GENTIANA. 
rubbish with tight heads of little and insignificant bluish stars in 
August, ridiculous at the end of those stalwart stem and wide wrap- 
pings of oval slack-textured foliage. (Siberia.) 
G. Burseri is a leafy tall yellowy-brown ugliness in the way of 
G. punctata. 
G. cachemirica may be found between 9000 and 13,000 feet in 
Kashmir and Kumaon. It isa neat tuft not unlike that of G. bavarica, 
but laxer, longer, leaficr, with the flowers sitting at the tops of the 
2- or 3-inch shoots, and wearing their lobes erect, as is so often the 
fashion among the high Indian Gentians, and almost unknown among 
their alpine cousins of Kurope. 
G. calycosa belongs to the highest levels of the Central Rockies 
and California, and is a striking beautiful species, growing from 
4 inches to a foot high, with stems clad in pairs of oval leaves about 
an inch in length, of which the upper ones enclose the solitary baggy 
bluebell of a flower that unfolds in later summer. There is a variety 
G. c. xantha, with yellowish blossoms, and sometimes those of the type 
are not solitary but two or three. 
G. cephalantha comes from China, and should go into the special 
bed if enthusiasts care to risk its threatening height of a foot and the 
ominous cluster-headed description offered by its name. The flowers, 
however, in their heads, are described as being of a brilliant blue. 
G. cerina.—It is a yet further cry to G. cerina, whose long branches, 
clothed in long narrow leafage, very fat and fleshy, and of the richest 
and deepest varnished polish, lie out and about on the lonely sea-rocks 
of the Aucklands, and up to 1000 feet in the hills, and end amid their 
leafage in clusters of wide ravishing flowers, shallower-belled than 
in our species, and more deeply divided into rounded lobes, but of 
glistering waxy whiteness, streaked with delicacies of pink or purple. 
For years the longing of the world has leapt across the distances to 
G. cerina, secure in those unvisited islands of the remotest South. 
Yet no one ever goes there, not even for Celmisia vernicosa, Pleuro- 
phyllum speciosum, Bulbinella Rossii, or Gentiana cerina. 
G. ciliata is the type of the impossibles. It is a very common 
species in all the alpine chains, flowering so late in the summer as to be 
the hateful harbinger of autumn ; and belongs especially to the lower 
levels (though it can also ascend to some 6000 feet), and always chooses 
rough plebeian places in the soil, by path-sides and so forth. It is 
particularly fine, for instance, along the first part of the zigzag that 
climbs from Misurina to the Popena Ridge, where its frail leafy stems 
spring up in mushroom-like abundance and rapidity as soon as the 
plant smells autumn. The big four-lobed blooms are of rare and 
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