GENTIANA. 
Meadow of precious mountain seeds, bestowed by the most evident of 
female zealots, had produced an unrivalled show of Escholtzias and 
cornflower and common annual poppies. Therefore unless the seed 
be wholly trustworthy and alpine, it is too sanguine to hope that you 
will possess G. nivalis, even as some of the high Scotch Alps possess it, 
glinting here and there with its eyes of a blue so violent that they even 
atone for the minuteness of the eyes themselves. 
G. nubigena is born of clouds on the Roof of the World ; it is some 
6 inches high at the most, but usually much less, with weak stems set 
with pairs of oblong narrow leaves about a couple of inches long, 
and ending in one or two fine trumpet flowers of an inch and a 
half, emerging from a calyx which is very much shorter than they. 
The blossoms are sometimes even three to a stem, being set on little 
footstalks, so as to give the effect almost of a spire. 
G. occidentalis. See under G. “ acaulis.” 
G. Olivieri is a poor thing in the same way as G. cruciata. 
G. ornata very doubtfully exists at all as a species, and the 
Veitchian plant sent out at first under the name has been promoted 
to G. Veitchiorum. Yet more superb is G. Farrert, which sends out 
many flopping slender shoots from the stock, clad in very narrow 
foliage, and ending each in a sing'’e huge up-turned trumpet wide- 
mouthed, and of an indescribably fierce luminous Cambridge blue 
within (with a clear white throat), while, without, long vandykes of 
periwinkle-purple alternate with swelling panels of nankeen, outlined 
in violet, and with a violet median line. As you see G. Farreri 
coming into bloom in mid-September in all the high-alpine sward of 
the Da-Tung chain (Northern Kansu-Tibet) it is by far the most 
astoundingly beautiful of its race, reducing G. verna and G. Gentianella 
to the dimmest acolytes. It thrives also with singular vigour in a 
cool rich soil, forming masses a yard across, whose glare of splendour 
is almost painful to the eye in August and September. 
G. pannonica is rather handsome in its coarse way ; being a tall leafy 
upstanding thing about 18 inches or 2 feet high, with large enveloping 
corrugated leaves in pairs, after the style of G. punctata, and then 
a series of axillary plump bells in the same style, with a big bunch at 
the top. But the spike is better furnished, and the ample flowers are 
of a dingy reddish-purple, with the lobes of the calyx turning down- 
wards instead of sticking to the corolla. G. pannonica scarcely occurs 
in Switzerland at all, but is not uncommon in the high pastures of the 
Eastern ranges, especially on limestone. In the garden all this section 
responds readily to treatment in free sunny loam, not parched, and 
kept open with chips and perhaps enriched with peat. The value of 
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