GEUM. 
stand sturdily erect the ample-petalled staring blossoms of pure 
white. 
G. elatum, from the high woods of Himalaya, is disqualified by its 
height of some 2 feet and more, though individually the big golden 
blooms have merit, if only they would not so stand on stilts. 
G. magellanicum can reach 2 feet, or stay at 2 inches. Its nearest 
neighbour in the race is G. pyrenaicum, and it is often confused with 
G. coccineum and G. chiloense. The flowers range from yellow to red. 
G. miniatum is G. chiloense. See under G. coccineum. 
G. montanum, when all is said and done, is almost the most precious 
of the family in the rock-garden. It is the golden Geum that creeps 
so close to the ground with its puckered green leaves and their large, 
rounded lobe at the end, and then those fat suns of bright gold that 
sit almost stemless on the Alps, and even in the garden do not exceed 
a quite modest stature of some 3 inches or so, asa rule. It is by far 
the most lovable of its race, and in the garden blooms early, and 
combines most especially with Anemone Robinsoniana and the 
double A. nemorosa, thriving so heartily almost anywhere that it soon 
forms into ample mats, whose fluffy roseate whirls of seed in autumn 
are only less notable than the ample yellow orbs of spring. 
G. pyrenaicum is very much the same, though taller in habit, 
even if rather larger also in the blossom. The leaves, too, are much 
longer, with the rounded lobe at the end especially big, and the little 
feathering leaflets up the blade more distant, and reduced to almost 
nothing. There are, however, dwarf high-alpine forms of this that 
approach the neat golden charm of G. montanum. 
G. radiatum (Sieversia Peckw) is a North American species of 
some value, varying between 4 inches high and 16 inches, and with 
from one to five large yellow flowers. 
G. reptans is the special glory of the highest moraines and shingles 
on non-calcareous Alps, where it makes vast woody rootstocks running 
down for yards among the blocks in the most coarse and barren 
tumbled ruins of those grim places, forming wide jungles of ferny 
foliage, with the leaves much more evenly feathered, and longer and 
finer and taller and more upstanding than in the tight and com- 
pacted stout-looking foliage of G. montanum (which is about a third 
of the size in all parts), and making mounds and green colonies that 
look singularly unnatural up there, where nothing, one feels, ought 
to have a stem at all; and yet here are boskets of this great thing 
among the boulders in plumy masses of 9 inches high and several 
feet across, often spreading into colonies many yards wide, or else in 
single clumps, from which long red strawberry-runners are emerging, to 
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