GENTIANA. 
three leaves (very often) a single flower or a pair of flowers, rather fat 
and baggy in outline, not opening out at the mouth, of a rather pallid 
creamy-white, with five stains of palest blue, and various greenish or 
blackish frecklings in the throat, with more of them outside. In 
cultivation it soon seems to die; and is little mourned. 
G. Froelichii is a charming little species far too rarely seen, especially 
as it combines beauty with ease of character. In point of fact it lies 
beyond the beaten track of tourists, living far away in the highest 
turf of the Eastern and Styrian limestones, where, in combination with 
Primula Wulfeniana, it fires even German botanists to speak of the 
lordly carpets there unfolded. In this carpet indeed G. Froelichii 
makes blots rather than patches ; forming quite small clumps, of two 
or three crowns, in a tuft of very narrow grooved leaves, the whole 
plant rather suggesting one or two stray rosettes of an exaggerated 
Dianthus alpinus, though of a paler yellower green and a dulled gloss. 
From this come up one or two stems of 1 or 2 inches, each usually 
carrying only one single flower, which is long and in shape a swollen 
tube, with lobes erect and not opening out ; yet very attractive in its 
size and in the clear pale-blue colouring of it, fading to yellow at the 
base, and spotted with dark at the throat—altogether suggesting 
blooms of a soft-blue G. Pnewmonanthe poising singly over a grassy tuffet 
like that of a big Phyteuma pauciflorum. In cultivation G. Froelichia 
proves perfectly easy and happy in the choicer part of the bed—if 
only you can succeed in starting with reasonably rooted pieces. For, 
in common with all alpine Gentians, it loathes root-disturbance ; and, 
like all that make but few fibres and do not form wads, it loathes 
root-disturbance to such a point that the few lonely odds and ends 
that are usually sent out by collectors stand little chance of re-estab- 
lishment under several seasons’ cure. Let but the plant, however, be 
collected reverently and with pains, and the next spring will see it as 
healthy a tuft as ever, quite ready to go out, and prosper more heartily 
than many of its kind in the Gentian bed, whether sandy or lime- 
fraught—flowering there with no less heartiness, too, in August, than 
it shows upon its native high downs. 
G. x Gaudiniana.—An ugly hybrid of G. punctata and G. purpurea, 
big and dingy. 
G. gelida lives on the Alps of Anatolia. It is quite near to G. sep- 
temfida in all its wants and ways, but the leaves are narrower, there 
are no fringes to the folds between the lobes of the corolla, and the 
corollas themselves are pale yellow. 
G. glauca is a small Pneumonanthe of only 2 or 3 inches in height, 
with weak little stems set in pairs of elliptic leaves, and ending in a 
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