GENTIANA. 
mats and carpets of little dwarf shoots, all densely clad in small pointed 
glossy leaves, rough at the edges, and of a bright shining green that 
gives the turf of them a comfortable and well-furnished look. Then 
from the densely leafy shoots of 2 or 3 inches protrude the flowers 
in May and June, each by itself, emerging from a longish narrow 
calyx (whose lobes do not stand out or spread) and then unfolding 
into a star of bright violet, the long tube expanding in five rounded 
lobes, with between them the toothed or crested interlobar folds so 
well developed also that the flower has the effect of having ten seg- 
ments instead of five; which gives it a richness of outline to match 
the richness of its clear and astonishing colour, which it should not be 
possible to call blew d’azur (in Correlonian phrase), as it is of the 
brightest, softest, and most decided pure violet. 
G. quinquefolia has a silly name which ought of course to be 
quinqueflora. Not that even its terminal clusters of five or three 
wide lilac-purple flowers in October can give it any special claims upon 
the garden, seeing that it attains a foot and a half, and that its 
pyramids of blossom, however comely upon the stem and branchlets, 
are hardly likely to show full value with us, unless it be in a specially 
warm and sheltered place in sandy rich mixture of peat and loam. 
G. Rochellii=G. vulgaris, for which see under G. “ acaulis.”’ 
G. Romanzoffit is the American G. frigida, q.v. 
G. Rostant is a most interesting species, akin to G. bavarica in 
habits, but in nothing else. It is very rare, confined to a few points 
at high elevations in the Cottian Alps on the French as on the Italian 
side, being found here and there in wet places among the grasses and 
stone-slides under Mansoul and Paravas and Monte Viso, where it 
may be seen in spring growing happily beneath a sheet of running 
water an inch deep. It forms tuffets as in G. bavarica, but the leaves 
are entirely personal, and distinct at a glance from all others. For they 
are notably thick, almost fleshy, oval, and very pointed, incurving 
upon the shoots, and giving the clump a special look of its own, quite 
unmistakable. From this tuft of leafy short shoots spring the flower- 
stems, which are slender and rather tall, about 3 inches high, with one 
or more pairs of those narrow, incurving, pointed leaves set on them 
at rare intervals, and then ending in a single wide flower-star of the 
most brilliant light velvety azure. If the mind of man can picture 
an intermediate between G. brachyphylla and G. pumila, it might 
not make so bad a picture by which to recognise true G. Rostani if 
ever the feet that that mind owns are fortunate enough to stray across 
Rostani’s marshes high up on the desolate granitic necks of the 
Cottians. In cultivation the plant does not always seem complacent, 
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