GENTIANA. 
and stiff, in pairs up the stem, and the azure flowers are gaping funnels 
of 2 inches or so, with their fine lobes twice as long as the cut-edged 
interlobar folds. (These North Americans all bloom in later summer.) 
G. procéra is a Fringe-flower, except that it is not fringed. For, 
while it resembles G. crinita in all else, the rounded lobes of the petals 
are merely toothed at the edge instead of cut into fine eyelashes. 
G. prostrata, however pretty, is only an annual and therefore of 
no use. 
G. Przewalskyi goes through life unfairly hampered by its truly un- 
propitious name, and is a species whose very existence is doubtful ; 
the lowlands of Koko-nor, Tibet, yield abundantly a smallish plant 
of slender and flopping growth in the cousinship of G. Kurroo, with 
narrow pairs of dark leaves, and gaping bells of violet or blue in 
summer, quite happily displayed in any deep rich soil, not shaded, in 
a sunny exposure. For a surer treasure, see G. Purdomit. 
G. puberula is found in the dry prairies of North America from 
Georgia to Minnesota ; where, in October, it sends up slender stems set 
with minutely downy rough narrow-oblong leaves, and ending usually 
in one large widely-open flower of bright blue, whose corolla-lobes are 
twice if not three times the length of the toothed folds between. 
G. pumila makes a mat of very narrow-leaved and small rosettes, 
that send up each a slender flower-stem of an inch or two, and carry 
each a single wide and starry blossom of a sapphire-blue velvet rich and 
deep and round as that of the midnight sky. The species is too rarely 
seen, for in gardens it merely asks the special bed into which all the 
special species are to be put; it is not familiar to the popular mind, 
for, though found not uncommonly in certain ranges, it is unknown 
in the hills that are beaten nearly flat with the feet of tourists, and may 
be hoped for only in the highest finest turf of the Eastern ranges, in 
Dauphiné, here and there in the Pyrenees of Aragon, in the Apennines 
on Monte Corno ; and then far away in the mountains where no one 
goes, in Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola. It may, however, be quite 
easily known, if not by its darkly passionate blue flower, then by its 
tufts, like those of a most minute lax G. verna, but with the leaves 
as perfectly straight and narrow and pointed as those of some tiny 
Dianthus stiffened and dulled. It is a plant of the rarest charm, no 
less in its delicate habit than in the soft and sombre profundity of its 
habitual colour. 
G. punctata, unlike G. pannonica, prefers the non-calcareous Alps, 
where it is abundantly found in the higher alpine pastures, bringing 
reproach on G. lutea by the faithful way it imitates the habit of 
its superior in stout stem, clad in stout pairs of corrugated light green 
383 
