GENTIANA. 
G. Bigelovii is very leafy and very near G. affinis, with the leaves 
thicker and often exceeding the flower-clusters. It is 4 inches to a 
foot in height and of no especial value. 
G. Boissiert awaits us in the high-alpine region of the Cilician 
Taurus on Aslandagh, Gisyl Tepe, &c.—a most beautiful small plant, 
exactly like a tight and tiny G. Pnewmonanthe but for the oval-pointed 
leaves which bring it nearer to a minute compacted form of G. septem- 
fida. It is only about 3 inches high, with flowers as large and blue 
and splendid in late summer, for the same cool treatment. 
G. Boryt may commonly be found at great elevations in the Sierra 
Nevada, on the southern face of Mulahaéen, in wet turfy places just 
below the summit, &c. It makes a dwarf tight tuft of leafy stems, 
each stem carrying a single flower, not very large, of whitish colour, 
deepening to pale blue in the lobes and folds, which are almost as 
long as lobes themselves, the flower sitting at the end of the shoot, 
enfolded in four leaves, and the same leaves, little, oval, fat, and 
shining, clothing the stem all the way down. 
G. brachyphylla is the high-alpine glory that takes the place of 
G. verna on the uppermost stone-slides, as does G. imbricata that of 
G. bavarica. It may quite easily be known, not only by the height at 
which it is found, but by the look of its neat tight tuffets, often nearly 
a foot wide, but usually concise round tartlets of pale glaucous-green, 
about 3 or 4 inches across, sitting close among the stones of the summit 
ridges and topmost shingles, and built of very many packed rosettes 
of rather incurving leaves, very broad and very pointed, in all respects 
like condensed, more numerous, fatter, stiffer leaves of a diminished 
G. verna, but specially distinct in the clear bluish-grey, yellowish-green 
tone of the tufts. The stemless or almost stemless flowers, too, 
cover the mass in a profusion so brilliant that to see a slope of hill 
occupied by G. brachyphylla in August is like looking down from 
heaven upon fallen slabs of sky. They are rather smaller than those 
of G. verna, of a blue more clear and light, thinner in the star, and with 
much longer thinner tubes to the corolla. It is generally distributed 
through the main alpine chains in the high shingles, and in the garden 
is curiously easy and satisfactory to cultivate under the common 
conditions of care required by all the small alpine Gentians. The 
flowering-time, alike in the hills and here, is in July and August, after 
G. verna, and with G. bavarica and G. imbricata. 
G. bracteosa blooms in May—an American species of some 4 inches, 
with flowers of lilac-blue. For the special bed. It is a narrow-leaved 
version of G. Parryi, q.v. 
G. brevidens is a floppet of the worst—a vast leafy great weakly 
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