ERODIUM. 
(Kotschy.), and #. armenum (Woronow)—any or all of these names 
appearing very often in the same list that has already described Z. 
absinthoeides. Here the leaves usually form a smaller neat tuffet, 
their stems being about as long as they are, while they themselves are 
grey with glandless close-pressed downy hairs, and slashed and slashed 
again into a plume of rather narrow-pointed jags. The flowers, in 
loose heads on shortish foot-stalks, are notably large and handsome (the 
finest of the family), and notably variable in their range from white 
to pink and violet. The following varieties are all most beautiful, 
and all are apt to be treated as species in catalogues, to the confusion 
of the collector (/. absinthceides, Sidth., and Sm., is #. chrysanthum, 
q.v.). 
E. abs. amanum, very delicate and lovely indeed, much dwarfer 
and slenderer than the type, hoary with dense short white hairs, 
with a number of basal leaves, stems of 6 inches or so, and the most 
ample flowers of pure and brilliantly lucent white in a lax spray. 
(Akma Dagh in Northern Syria.) 
EH. abs. cinereum, taller, with stiffer stems to the flower-heads; 
greyer, and with the strips of the leaves long-pointed and very narrow. 
(Turkish Armenia, &c.) 
H. abs. Sibthorbianum (£. olympicum, Boiss.), with the leaves almost 
silky, and then turning smooth, growing in a dense tuft, and in outline 
oval-triangular, but feathered into finer narrower strips than in 
E. amanum; but here again the stem is only about 6 inches high. 
Blossoms large as before, but rosy-lilac. (From Pontus, the Bithynian 
Olympus, &c.) 
E. alpinum is the only plant in this group where there is no true 
stem, but the scape of the flowers springs directly from the stock. By 
this it may always be known in this section; and, from the next, by 
the lack of any little lobule between the feathering along the leaves, 
Very often it is not an inch high, this stem, and never exceeds half a 
foot or so, rising up amid a copious mass of leafage, and carrying heads 
of some two to nine violet butterflies more than half an inch across, 
with petals unspotted and of equal size. The leaves are narrow-oblong 
in outline, scantily clad in short hairs, and cut and cut again into 
rather broad acute jagged strips, sharply toothed along each jag, and 
with their foot-stalks densely woolly. (High Alps of the Abruzzi and 
the Roman Apennines.) 
E. cedrorum (H. Kotschyanum, Boiss.) makes a many-headed trunk, 
sending up short and often branching stems of some 7 or 10 inches, 
set here and there with foliage, and dense with glands. From the 
stock itself springs a great number of basal leaves, hairy and egg- 
342 
