HOMOGYNE. 
pea-flowers flopping from the neat mass of leaves in June, is an admir- 
able plant for a sunny bank in any ordinary light soil, and by nature 
a lover oflime. Smaller than this is H. glauca from the alps of Greece, 
which forms a close tuft of hoary grey instead of a radiating cushion 
or long curtain of clear green, and has woodier trunks and slenderer 
stems to the flower-heads, of which the golden peas are smaller, 
(Seed.) 
Homogyné, a dingy little family from the alpine woods, 
whose neat rounded kidney-shaped leaves of glossiest veined green 
give promises of beauty that are not borne out by the squalid tassel 
of a flower, alone and sad upon a naked stalk of some 6 inches. The 
species at the disposal of specialists (and in damp shady woodland 
comers the foliage is not without attraction) are H. alpina, H. discolor, 
and H. silvestris, of which the last alone has lobes to the leaves, the 
kidney outline of the others remaining unviolated. H. discolor is 
known by the silver-haired reverse to the foliage, which in H. alpina 
is merely set with scanty hairs. 
Horminum pyrenaicum.—The time is gone by now for 
Horminum pyrenaicum. In former days it was the one thing over 
which books of gardening and catalogues alike waxed really lyrical ; 
and in catalogues, indeed, the name endures to this hour, in spite of the 
fact that the poor gardener, that patient worm, has long since turned, 
and declared that if ever there were an undistinguished dowdy weed 
it is this—a coarse and rampant thing, forming large rosetted tufts of 
dark sullen-looking scalloped oval foliage, leaden and dull, from which 
rise spikes of some 8 inches with dull and leaden little flowers of an 
uninspired purple like those of some very indifferent Salvia. It is 
predominantly a plant of the Pyrenees and then of the Eastern 
ranges ; it is interesting to note that even Mr. Stuart Thompson has 
only met it on the Stelvio, whereas in the Dolomites, that paradise 
to which the Stelvio is the dreary gate, you cannot take a walk in 
any direction without trampling leagues of Horminum, a typical lime- 
stone species, indeed, that fills the upper alpine turf with its wads and 
masses of vulgar leafage. In cultivation the plant is worth the trouble 
it gives, which is none. It likes lime, and there is no more to be said 
for it. Occasionally rather more ample forms are to be found, and 
once I got a white one that was really pretty, with a fine hem of 
purple round its lip, but on the whole this dowdy thing is best left to 
catalogues, which never fail to include it, and proclaim its charms 
vociferously—perhaps, as Mr. Stuart Thompson rather cruelly but 
justly suggests, because it is almost the only large alpine Labiate that 
could possibly, by the utmost stretch of even a catalogue’s courtesy, 
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