GENTIANA. 
G. angustifolia, Vill. See under G. “ acaulis.” 
G. angustifolia (Mich.) is an American late-summer species, of 
18 inches high, leafy stems, and clustered blue flowers. 
G. arvernensis. See under G. Pneumonanthe. 
G. asclepiadea is the glory of the sub-alpine woods in moist coppice 
and open damp fields, where its long bending sheaves of graceful 
blossom make a famous loveliness in late summer and autumn. The 
Willow-gentian is of the same amiability in the garden, and soon, if 
planted in a deep cool bed or border, will be showing swathes of flower 
3 feet high and more in August, inclining this way and that beneath 
the burden of its beautiful sapphire trumpets, tucked all along the 
upper half of the boughs in the axils of the dark oval-pointed leaves 
in their flattened arch of pairs. Care should be taken to get good 
forms, however ; the Alps have produced plants of dingy and slaty 
colouring, though such a degradation is rare. They have also pro- 
duced a white of much charm, though less than that of the type—as is 
almost always the case in Gentiana—and rich forms harlequined with 
snow ; and, beside many paler tones, they have once produced, and 
may again, the now almost vanished G. a. phaeina, with flowers of 
dazzling Cambridge-blue like a summer sky at dawn. Many are the 
pretenders to this name and claimants to this praise, but among many 
beautiful light-blue and pale forms there has only once been a Phaeina. 
Seed of the species germinates like cress, and makes good flowering 
plants in some three seasons. Where the plant occurs at all in the 
Alps, it occurs with lavish profusion, wholly indifferent, it seems, as to 
whether there be lime in the soil or not. 
G. barbata should be disregarded. It is a fringed biennial or 
parasitic Gentian after the style, beauty, and impossibility of G. 
ciliata. 
G. barbellata (G. Moseleyi), though a Fringe-flower, is truly perennial, 
from a slender fleshy stock. It is a delicate beauty, some 4 inches 
high, with about four pairs of broadish oblong leaves on the stems, 
and then an inch-long bloom of dark blue, wildly fringy at the edge 
and filled with wool inside. A rare species of Colorado for a choice 
place in the choice bed. 
G. bavarica is the grief and the glory of the gardener in wet 
meadows of the alpine level, where its satiny stars of dark sapphire 
appear like splashes of midnight among the turf in August. Often a 
difficulty is found by travellers in differentiating this from G. verna—a 
difficulty quite incomprehensible indeed, but still requiring to be 
smoothed away. In the first place, the flowers in G. bavarica are of a 
characteristic velvety intense darkness, unlike those of G. verna in any 
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