GERANIUM. 
among the upstanding finely-clawed and fingered foliage, stick flowers 
like those of an Oxalis enneaphylla, larger and whiter and wider and 
more delicately vase-shaped than any ever seen by man. Thus you 
will have some faint notion of G. nivale, and its triumphant loveliness. 
G. Pylzowianum stands eminent among the most precious of my 
introductions. In the alpine hay throughout the Northern Marches of 
Tibet, it runs very frailly about, ejecting on twinned thread-fine 
pedicels larger flowers than those of G. sanguineum, and of a purer, 
clearer rose ; while the gaunt,.barren shingles above, at 13,000—14,000 
feet, are filled with tufted masses of what is at present declared, 
but certainly mistakenly, to be only a high-alpine form of this, but 
making such clumpy cushions of gleaming silver foliage, so over- 
borne by flights of palest pearl-pink blossom, that G. argentewm itself 
is beaten out of the field. 
G. Renardit hardly reaches a foot, so that its beauty may make a 
successful claim upon our notice. Its five-lobed rounded leaves are 
all clad in silk on both sides, and shimmering with silver beneath. 
The blooms stand up in a loose pyramid, and are of clear white delicately 
veined. This lovely thing belongs to the fields of Ossetian Caucasus. 
G. sanguineum is too large and coarse, and of too fiery a terribleness 
of colour for any choice spot in the rock-garden, but its albino is so 
dainty and graceful as to be worthy of admittance anywhere, while 
its variety, or sub-species G. lancastriense, is, in present default of 
G. nivale, the jewel of the race, making flat cushions of fine green, set 
all the summer through with the most beautiful wide ample flowers 
of the tenderest and truest rose-pink, veined with deeper lines, and 
each dancing in delight at its own loveliness, on a delicate fine stem. 
From spring to winter this never ceases to be in bloom, and from seed 
comes copiously and true. Even as one of the sights of the world 
is that of G. argenteum sheeting upmost Baldo in silver, and starring 
its lawns with wavering rose-pale bells, so another parallel wonder is 
to see the fine lawn of Lancashire, at the one classical place, all set 
with the similar dancing, blushing blossoms of G. lancastriense, flat 
upon their mass, and starring the long levels of seaward turf with 
galaxies of pink. And here, too, though it remains constant to itself, 
yet it also seems to breed back towards G. sanguineum, and the most 
magnificent forms may be seen, together with every degree of inter- 
mediacy, with lancastriense’s close-matted prostrate habit, and the 
large, uniformly crimson-red blossoms of G. sanguinewm, yet richer 
and truer in tone, and with that opulent veining; but always keeping 
flat, whatever be the colour of the flower. And always keeping flat, no 
less, in the garden, though they do not there have quite the neat, 
394 
