HELICHRYSUM. 
particularly light open soil, with the most perfect drainage and in full 
sun ; and then they should also, in August, be freely struck from cut- 
tings, that the parent plant may not depart from you in winter and 
leave you wholly desolate. These are the best of the smaller species : 
H. bellidioeides is perhaps the best of all, and a treasure not only 
of singular beauty but also of a far happier temper than most. For it 
lacks the dense and dangerous ermine in which the rest go garbed, 
and in any warm sandy soil grows at such a pace as in a summer 
to be a flat carpet a yard wide, the long shoots being set with oval- 
pointed leaves, white-grey below but on the upper surface dark and 
smooth and shining. Then, all over the mass, on stems of 3 or 4 inches, 
come the most delicate wide Everlastings, snowy and gleaming and 
scaly. The plant is not only easy, it is also quite surely hardy in all 
fair conditions, and comes from the Southern Alps of New Zealand 
and the Antarctic Islands beyond. (H. bellidifolium of lists.) 
H. Billiardieri ; very small woolly-white leaves along the shoots 
that form into dense cushioned masses, and then send up 6-inch stems, 
carrying each a single pure-white Everlasting, specially wide and 
ample and shining, with the silvery scales of the flower-frill of unequal 
length. (From the cliffs of Lebanon.) 
H. compositum lives in the highest rocks of Cadmus in Caria, and 
elsewhere in Lycia—making most dense and wide cushions of pure 
white wool, with flower-stems of nearly a foot. 
H. frigidum gives more trouble than all the money it costs. For it 
is a daintily lovely species from high warm places of Corsica, minute, 
mosslike in growth, with tiny shoots of close-packed bluish-white 
foliage, and then the most beautiful Everlastings of snowy silver-white- 
ness, on stems of 2 inches or so. This miffy beauty exacts the most 
profound regard. There is little use in sending for it to dwell beneath 
cool and weeping skies of grey; even in hot and sunny gardens it 
should have a place of special choiceness, full in the foreground, on a 
warm slope, in soil that is light, yet nourishing as the diet of such an 
invalid should be, and filled with stones to promote digestion and avert 
dropsy. And then, when the plant has lived through the summer, 
and made a rather less minute tuft than before, hostages should be 
taken off it in August. and struck in sand, while the clump itself, no 
later than September, should go to rest beneath a large and wide- 
spread roof of glass or bough of fir or gorse. 
H. grandiceps is truly magnificent. It plays at being a Flannel- 
flower, and on the Edelweiss greatly improves in having remarkably 
broad and short woolly-grey bracts (not leaves transmogrified) frill- 
ing out round the flower-head, which is borne on a stem of half a foot 
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