LITHOSPERMUM. 
LL. coeruleum (Moltkia) is a blue-flowering sub-shrub from Lycia 
and Caria, &c. 
L. erythrorrhizon is a meibuts’, or special sight, of various plains 
and moors in Japan ; it is the Ko-murasaki, the Little Forget-me-not, 
from whom one of the saddest of Japanese heroines has her ill-starred 
name ; and is a centre of lovers’ meetings and old romance, since the 
days of the Sumiyoshi monogatari of a thousand years ago, when the 
prince-lover had his sight of his long-lost Little Princess, on the moor 
of the Lithospermum that they had both gone out, like all the world, 
to see—just, for all our world, as nowadays they would have met 
at the Kinematograph, or outside the windows of Harrods. But L. 
erythrorrhizon does not quite deserve in our eyes all this celebrity, 
despite its blue flowers and its red root. For the red root is difficult 
to import and hard to re-establish, while the blue flowers are small 
enough on stems sufficiently leafy to dull the edge of our regret for 
the fact. (My original L. « erythrorrhizon”’ is L. japonicum.): 
L. x Froebeli is a garden hybrid of great beauty, akin to LD. inter- 
medium, with the blood of L. graminifolium in its veins, conjoined 
probably with that of L. petraewm, resulting in a tidy mass of long and 
narrow-leaved dark rosettes on erect shrubby stems of a few inches, 
and divided branching sprays of beautiful deep azure of early summer. 
L. fruticosum is a branchy woody bush about 6 or 12 inches high, 
set with narrow foliage rolled over at the rims, and with each twisting 
peeling trunk ending in many clusters of large blooms of brilliant 
purple-azure. From the dry stony places of Eastern and Southern 
Spain, but most especially in the limestone. For the same fate seems 
to have overtaken Lithospermum that so long lay heavy on Daphne; 
being always found actually growing, like all hill-children, in the peat 
of the hills (which are naturally composed of little else, by the decay of 
a thousand centuries), their unobservant recorders failed to notice that 
the subsoil of their happiness was almost invariably lime; so that 
they have been treated ever since as plants resolutely calcifuge, with 
the worst results to their own reputation, as to every gardener’s purse 
and reputation. 
L, Gastont is a distinct and rare species from the Pyrenees, with 
dependent shoots well furnished with rather broader laxer foliage than 
in most, with nestling heads of noble large wide flowers of a glorious 
clear blue-and-white, seeming to stare out from the sheet that the 
shoots form in the shadow of a rock. Much has been talked and 
written of its culture, many men prescribing many treatments. Pro- 
bably the trouble is that, like so many Lithospermums, it is really a 
passionately lime-craving plant, but is always denied its right food by 
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