GEUM. 
brutal assortment, from the size of a child’s head to that of a man’s 
coffin. 
G.xrhaeticum is the result of one of the rare meetings between 
G. reptans and G. montanum. For it is only in the high places of the 
Engadine that, as you are walking across a stone patch, you are 
suddenly struck with a monstrous G. montanum at your feet—a mass 
of the ordinary dense creeping habit, but with leaves that somehow 
look different, even.if the flowers were not so much larger, and had 
not that especially short-petalled, fat look, and cool clear glamour of 
electric gold that one is so familiar with in the more noble reptans: 
and, true enough, though one takes the high road and the other the 
low road, the two species have met at last here beside the waters of 
the upmost rivers of the Engadine, G. reptans descending from their 
austere source, with the stones that are their cradle, while G. montanum 
mounts with the Primulas, in the comfortable fine turf to which the 
stone-slides fall. And here, accordingly, G. rhaeticum is born, and a 
most beautiful and valuable child, of a glory rare among Geums, 
having the beauty of one parent and the heartiness of another; the 
general neat charm of montanum coupled with something of the 
immense and irradiating flowers of G. reptans, whose alloy of gold-and- 
silver light makes so much sharper and keener a pale flame than the 
more ordinary robust yellow of G. montanum. 
G. rivale is our own Water-Avens, and a common species in the 
sub-alpine meadows of the North, though a rare one in the South. It 
is, however subtle in its charm of nodding terra-cotta-coloured 
flowers in purple calyces, too unsubtle in its manners for admittance 
to the garden, for it soon proves as much a weed as ugly little G. 
urbanum, and has to be as laboriously got rid of. But there are finer 
forms advertised in catalogues: Leonard’s variety is good, and so is 
the natural hybrid, G. x intermedium, between G. rivalex G. urbanum, 
which results in large, wide, rosy-salmon blossoms of the utmost beauty 
and too rarely seen. It is, alas! many years now since, in an open 
place of the woods here, I came upon my first and unrepeated sight of 
G. intermedium. 
G. Rossii should now, according to some, change its name to 
Sieversia turbinata. But the old classification will serve for English 
gardens which are not often troubled with the American Geums, 
handsome though this particular species be, dwarf after the style of 
G. montanum, only about 3 inches high or half a foot at most, with fine 
flowers of bright yellow, showing up well above the dark green and 
purple of the foliage. 
G. triflorum (Sieversia ciliata) is a tallish, reddish North American 
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