GENTIANA. 
All of these can well be raised from seed or propagated by cuttings, 
and grown in warm poor soil. 
G. albida is a densely branching prostrate plant, of as many varieties 
as merits ; for it contains GG. Pestalozzae, armena, Monitbretii, Goldettiz. 
G. aspalathoeides is often sent out from Spain, in which as a point 
of fact it does not at all occur. For the true G. aspalathoeides lives 
only in Algiers and Tunis, venturing just at one point into Europe, 
where it effects foothold midway between Africa and Italy, on the 
_ island of Pantellaria. It is in any case a most neat and hostile little 
porcupine of a bush about 6 inches high, and a worthy golden- 
flowered peer to Erinacea. 
G. Bowssiert is the Piorno Fino of the mid-alpine region of the 
Sierra Nevada, a neat tight thorny mass; exactly the same descrip- 
tion serving also for G. horrida, which is the common Erizones, from 
the dry places and fields, especially on limestone, in the mountain 
region of the Eastern and French Pyrenees. But in G. Boissieri 
the calyx of the no less golden flower is shaggy with silver fluff. 
G. libanotica makes a creeping very branchy mat and sends up 
stiff erect shoots with leaflets clad in white hairs. It grows among the 
Cedars on the mountain, and extends higher up into the stony places. 
G. Loebelii is the pretender almost invariably sent out as G. aspala- 
thoeides, which it precisely repeats, except that the lower lip of the 
calyx is larger and deeply cut into three lobes. This species occupies 
all the Northern half of the Mediterranean region. 
G. micrantha is a tufted bushling from 4 inches to a foot high, with 
pointed shining leathery little leaves, quite narrow and quite hairless, 
with thickish racemes of some five to twenty yellow flowers. (Woods 
and downs almost all over Spain, except in the West.) 
G. murcica is, like G. Loebelii, a twin to Erinacea—or rather an elder 
brother ; for, while G. Loebelii matches it at 4 or 6 inches, G. murcica 
develops to the greater stature of 6 or 9. 
G. sagittalis is common and coarse, but most useful for a hot and 
worthless place, with floundering long masses of dark-green cactoid 
foliage, not like leaves at all, and abundant spikes cf gold in early 
summer, that flow across the shingles in a bright flood. 
G. teretifolia is bigger, but graceful and pretty, with foot-high 
stems, fine and dainty, silver-hoary and specially free with golden 
blossoms. It grows with G. (Cytisus) tinctoria in the fields of Pam- 
peluna. 
Gentiana.—Take it all in all, perhaps Gentiana offers the rock- 
garden more glory than any other race, and more persistently denies 
it. To please Primula is possible, to cope with Campanula ‘s even 
359 
