GENTIANA. 
of a garden-party will meet the case ; in the fourth year heaven will be 
broken by rare clouds of green ; and in the fifth you will feel, if massive 
shows are your aim, that the process must be begun anew. Therefore it 
is as well to keep your beds of G. Gentianella in rotation, so as always to 
have some in perfection ; so that you may be in the end like a friend of 
mine, of whom I had heard that he grew G. Gentianella to some purpose, 
and wrote accordingly to inquire what sort of extent he had in display. 
To which inquiry came back the stunning answer that he did not think 
he had much more than five miles of it. And so indeed the matter 
proved. At the same time, may we not urge upon all true lovers of 
the plant, not to take too much advantage of its wonderful good 
nature and robin-like attachment to the gardener, by growing it in 
tight hard lines as edgings and borders; be it never so splendid, it is 
not thus it looks its best. for the scent of the hills is too strong upon 
it still, though it may pretend to have forgotten them, or even think 
it has. But, if it can achieve such miracles of beauty in the dry wood 
of the border, what could it not achieve in the green, of proper rock- 
garden treatment, planted in rich wide sweeps and banks and 
stretches of fallen sky, with Crocus aureus here and there among it for 
spring, and C. zonatus among it here and there for autumn? And, 
for a closing recommendation, remember yet again that the plant 
is a child of lime, and a glutton for full doses of mortar-rubble and 
bone-meal. It is well worth raising, too, from seed, as several glorious 
pale blues have so arrived ; but the white form is but a poor thing of 
thin colour, like inferior sermon-paper soaked in water ; its only chance 
of effect is to be planted here and there among the azure masses of the 
type, instead of being stuck away by itself as a precious jewel, where 
its full inferiority shows unrelieved by contrast. As for the so-called 
rosea-form, this belongs to the wild species; to which, after this 
parenthesis, we return. 
G. latifolia,—This name covers the common alpine Gentian of the 
upper turf that always has had before to put up with a chief share in the 
huge word G. acaulis. It swallows up for ever, too, these three confusing 
names of lists and catalogues: G. excisa, G. grandiflora, G. Kochiana. 
This plant may easily be recognised by the disappointment it usually 
occasions in one who has met G. “‘acaulis’”’ of popular usage in the 
garden, and had thought that G. acaulis of the Alps would at least 
bear it some small resemblance. But this is a sad inferior thing, and 
its spotted trumpets are almost always of a dead indigo tone, light or 
dark, sometimes even muddy and slate-coloured, but hardly ever 
tinged with the skyey note that one demands of a Gentian. However, 
in this matter it varies, as indeed do many; and on the Rolle Pass, 
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