GENTIANA. 
spreading species with which it can cope on equal terms and be the 
better for doing so. Furthermore, it will be greatly helped if, like 
the rest, it be kept dry with panes of glass or boughs of gorse in 
winter—these Gentians always want a good winter’s rest, quite as 
much as do such obvious fluffets as Eritrichium ; and, indeed, at all . 
times, despite their incessant thirst while growing, much prefer to 
have that thirst gratified from underground, and are by no means 
fond of having it administered overhead. 
G. verna is a remarkably variable species in the Alps, and it is most 
dangerous to buy collected plants unless you are sure of the collector’s 
eye and care and taste. For there are many small, thin, squinny-starred 
developments, not to be borne with when once you have seen the best 
forms doing their best, and with ample broad-lobed galaxies running 
G. aestiva close in the race of beauty. Whole districts of the Alps pro- 
duce only worthless types of G. verna; on the Grigna, for instance, 
it is not worth the trampling; but where you get G. aestiva, there 
G. verna is always nettled into showing what it, too, can achieve. 
On the Mont Cenis, on the Schlern, it is more magnificent than tongue of 
man can tell, tangled up in a riotous carpet of Violas, Globularias, 
Potentillas, Erysimum, and Forget-me-not, till the gardener’s soul 
falls fainting upon that floor of colour in helpless and hopeless ecstasy 
at sight of a reality so dispiritingly far ahead of his most radiant 
dreams. There are colour-forms, too, offered for large prices, and some 
of them worth having: G. verna chionodoxa is not at all infrequent— 
a pure albino, looking like a little white periwinkle ; the rosea variety, 
however, flatters itself, and is not so much pink as of a dingy mauve ; 
of which there is also another, of a curious dead-amethyst colour, 
rather subtle and attractive in its flat lifelessness; Grandifloras and 
Atrocoeruleas are, of course, merely pre-eminent flowers in the type ; 
but G. verna coelestina is one of the very loveliest of plants, and as rare 
as G. asclepiadea phaeina, though forms of pale Cambridge-blue are 
not uncommon, and extremely beautiful. But they do not catch the 
keen and sharp-edged note of coelestina’s vivid young azure, fresh as 
dawn and visible from far away on the hill; and on some of the lime- 
stone alps of Lombardy the prevailing form, in great patches up and 
down the fine turf of the upper slopes, is of rich and velvety violet 
purple, lighter or darker in tone, but always opulent and splendid. 
Finally, let no one be unhappy for the white eye of G. verna gone blue ; 
that white eye merely marks the advertising stage of the flowers; they 
all have that moment, and it is after fertilisation that they all econo- 
mically shut it up again, and seem wholly blue. The plant may be 
propagated by cuttings struck in sand, or raised from seed ; it is ex- 
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