LITHOSPERMUM. 
the decrees of fashionable horticulture. One of the finest specimens in 
England is giving daily thanks by its fineness for a soil composed of 
one half leaf-mould and the rest old mortar rubble. Other soils, 
however, in other places have brought success, and the treasure has 
thriven ill and well, alike in sun and in shade; though its look makes 
a distinct appeal, it would seem, for mercy against the full weight of 
the sun—at least in hot gardens. When well-established it will run 
about and make itself a nuisance—a nuisance for which many gar- 
deners would gladly compound. 
L. graminifolium makes the chief of the herbage in some of the 
higher hills that fringe the Plain of Lombardy ; there its huge masses, 
2 or 3 yards wide, of very long and very narrow dark grass-like foliage 
fill the upper grass of the whole mountain ; and its cushions flop over 
the track and sheet the slopes in pure colour at the end of May, with 
their branching heads on 6- or 9-inch stems of the most lovely swinging 
tubes of soft pale blue. In the garden it is almost the best of its race, 
having always, alone of its race, been allowed the lime it wants. So 
here it forms masses hardly less wide than at home, no less profuse 
in June with its spreading rockets of delicate sky-pale bugles—at least 
when you can get the true plant, which is now grown rare, although 
it multiplies not only by seed and by cuttings, but also by layers 
managed like a carnation’s, with sandy soil worked down among the 
rosettes of the mass. 
L. Hancockianum is talked of with bated breath as being about to 
come out of China and make the dawn ashamed with the magnitude of 
its pure celestial blossoms. I know no more of L. Hancockianum. 
L. hirtum is another American species, of the same needs and brief 
prosperity as L. canescens. This comes from the pine-barrens, from 
Minnesota to Colorado, making the same tuft of foliage, which here 
is bristlish to start with, and ends by being rough. The stems are 1 
or 2 feet high, carrying heads of fine ample-orbed flowers of bright 
orange, deeply cleft into five lobes with prominent arching crests and 
ten hairy flaps round the ring of its throat. 
L. intermedium stands, in habit if not in birth, between L. gramini- 
folium and L. petraeum, making sub-shrubby masses of long-leaved 
dark rosettes, from which arise 8-inch stems with spreading heads of 
brilliant deep-blue blossom in June or late in May. This is of un- 
troubled comfort in even ordinary loam. 
L. japonicum must have blossomed unseen, for the Japanese to 
have turned their eyes on L. erythrorrhizon. For L. japonicum turns 
the upland woods and open coppices to wide unbroken sheets of pure 
fallen sky in its time, with profusion of great shilling-wide planets of 
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