HYPERICUM. 
much dwarfer H. hyssopifoliwm, from all of whose forms indeed it 
can quite easily be told by its lower stature, flattened habit, and by 
the flowers which are carried in long racemes that look like remarkably 
drawn-out loose spikes. It is a good and useful species, but in no way 
a peer to either of the plants it follows in example, nor to the one 
that follows it in the alphabet. It comes from sunny hills all over 
Asia Minor, and is common in gardens and catalogues. 
H. reptans is a wonder in the race—a beauty absolutely prostrate 
and of growth almost excessive in its vigour, forming such streaming 
curtains of its shoots over any high rock that in time the sheet may 
spread wide enough to be a nuisance to choicer but no more beautiful 
neighbours. The whole mat is of bright light green, the oval leaves 
that clothe the stems being of thin texture, smooth, and of the heartiest 
emerald, so densely developed that the plant is a verdant carpet, 
which, however, takes tones of yellow and red in spring and autumn. 
The flowers flop or lie upon the mass, from late summer until winter 
says ‘“‘no more.” They are of enormous size and amplitude, like 
dog-roses of electric gold, and on the outside their buds are varnished 
with a burnished mahogany-crimson, most strange and brilliant 
among the unfolded pale gleam of the flowers. This most lovely of 
its race should be set, like a city, upon an hill, so that the faces of its 
flowers may not be hid, but stare forth at the passer-by from their 
sheeted background of green, cascading from a sheer rock. It may 
readily be raised too from seed, its capsules often standing unscattered 
through the winter; and may no less readily be raised from cuttings 
too. Though perfectly hardy and of almost terrible vigour, it should 
be remembered that this precious evergreen comes to us from the 
temperate region of Sikkim, and is not always patient if set in situa- 
tions too bleak and exposed to the rigours of cold and wind. But in 
more decent places there is no doing anything but brilliantly with it. 
H. retusum is a twin to H. hyssopifolium but that the leaves are 
specially blunted or notched at the end. (Syria.) 
H. rhodopeum (H. origanifolium, Urv.) is a prostrate grey-hoary 
tuffet from sun-trodden slopes of Thrace and Macedonia, with blunt 
oblong little leaves, and the flowers, one, two, or three, at the ends of 
the shoots. 
H. Richeri has been used as the type of so many of its kin that it 
must now be described with a minuteness that its beauty does not 
deserve, though its rarity may. For it is rather a stiff stout thing, 
with a roundish stem about a foot high, ending in a cluster of large 
and brilliant flowers. This stem is set with, and almost embraced by, 
a certain number of oval leaves in pairs, marked with a line of black 
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