GENTIANA. 
connotation was ever attached to the name of G. brevidens was 
because it was once applied to G. Kurroo, as a varietal name of the 
frightful G. decwmbens—both G. decumbens and G. brevidens being, in 
point of fact, mere versions of type decumdens, and not by any means 
the originals of G. Kurroo. In cultivation G. Kurroo has its caprices ; 
its raiser grows it in rows like potatoes in rich kitchen-garden soil, 
under a hot wall in a hot exposure of a hot county. None the less 
the plant is perfectly hardy, and has weathered many Northern winters 
unhurt, on open sunny banks of the rock-work. But it is as well to 
remember that it seems to crave heat and damp and perfect drainage. 
It should be at the foot of a rock in the sunniest and hottest 
exposure of the garden, in a soil that should be a deep, rich, and 
heavyish stony loam ; and there be kept well watered from under- 
ground in spring and summer. 
G. x Laengstii is a natural hybrid between G. pannonica and G.. lutea. 
G. Lagodechiana. See G. septemfida. 
G. latifolia. See under G. “ acaulis.”’ 
G. Lawrencei is a slighter, paler, frailer G. Farrert. 
G. linearis is an American species of some worth, blooming in late 
summer, and for the treatment of all the Septemfidas and Pneumon- 
anthes. It is slender and erect in habit, some half a foot or 18 inches 
or more, with slender bluish-white funnels, erect-lobed, gathered at the 
tops of the shoots into heads of about five. The leaves are narrow 
(there is a broader-foliaged variety called G. 1. latifolia), and the plant 
is a lover of bogs. 
G. lineata belongs to regions untrodden of the far South, where, in 
the Stewart Islands, as also in the Southern Alps of New Zealand, it 
‘makes tufts so dense that they form into a turf of basal foliage emitting 
erect densely-leaved little shoots. From these mats arise naked wiry 
stems of 3 inches or so, carrying each a single flower about half 
an inch across. 
G. lutea.—The huge and stalwart yellow Gentian of the Alps has 
not always been duly appreciated. There is no doubt that at its 
best it is a truly glorious object, with its vast corrugated leafage, 
and towering spires of fine-rayed golden stars in dense whorled clusters 
to the top of the 3- or 4-foot stem. It may be seen especially magni- 
ficent on the banks between Susa and Bardonecchia ; while the slopes 
at the upper end of the Mont Cenis Lake are aglow in August with 
the countless multitudes of its golden campanili. The plant’s medi- 
cinal root, however, is huge and wholly unnegotiable, nor does its 
stature admit it to the rock-garden: but in open sunny places of the 
wild, in hayfields like those of the Alps where it shines so richly above 
379 
