DRYAS OCTOPETALA. 
and blue flowers; D. botryoeides, of 4 inches and pink; D. hetero- 
phyllum, of 6 inches and yellow; D. thymiflorum, of 10 inches and 
violet-blue ; and D. peregrinum, also violet-blue, but a foot high. 
These are of easy culture in light open places. Seed. D. fragile is a 
dainty thing from Davuria, with the flower-whorls in a cylindric spike, 
and two new species have lately come in from China, D. bullatuwm 
and D. tanguticum, neither of them in the front rank; D. bullatum 
being after the fashion of the Grandiflorum group, but soft and lax, 
with luscious foliage to the luscious and pleasant blue Dragon- 
heads, while D. tanguticum is no improvement in this, forming a bush 
of narrow-leaved densely leafy shoots of some 8 inches or so, closely 
set in late summer with such a profusion of blossom that, though 
the individual flowers are rather small and wizen and of no 
great show, their abundance results in a pleasant fuzzy-looking cat’s- 
tail or thin plume of violet all through late summer till far into autumn. 
It grows and establishes quite readily, and has almost the look of a 
large-flowered, erect rosemary-bushling, while D. bullatum, so it is 
hopefully said, will show yet finer character if allowed to occupy for 
some years some sunny place, where it may form a wide mat, each 
shoot being headed by those meek dragons that may perhaps be more 
effective in a mass. And much finer is my D. Purdomit. 
The New Zealand Dragon-heads, however, also are of a distin- 
guished note. Of these are fitted for our hopes D. Menziesit, a little 
shrub of a foot or two high, with concave sharp stiff leaves clustered 
at the tips of the naked shoots, and then beautiful great helmets of 
waxy-white, wide and ample. This, in its dwarfer states, is an 
alpine of the South Island up to 4500 feet. D. muscoeides, according 
to Kew=D. minimum of Tasmania, also a treasure, but this has stiffer, 
shorter, less acute, more overlapping foliage; it forms into a dense, 
minute, moss-like mass, with white flowers either solitary upon it, or 
in rounded clumps of a few. (From the Alps of the Southern Island, 
4000 to 6000 feet.) 
Dryas octopetala is the sovereign of all shrubs for the rock- 
garden, with its hearty flat evergreen carpets of little oak-like leaves, 
grey beneath, and snowed over in June with immense flowers like 
creamy and glorified versions of Anemone baldensis, on stalks of 2 
inches or so, that afterwards draw up to 4 or 5 inches, to bear the 
hardly less beautiful silver fluff-whirls of the seed. The plant can be 
grown in any reasonable soil, and in any sunny place, requiring nothing 
but to be well planted and then left alone (with a top dressing at times) 
to get larger and wider for ever. It often wrestles in the Alps with 
Gentiana verna, and perhaps might be so far from « throwing ” it in the 
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