LITHOSPERMUM. 
This is of quite easy culture, too, in any decent loam, but specially 
repays a choice crevice on the sunny side of the rockwork, where the 
tidy bush may develop its full fecundity. Cuttings or seed (freely 
produced by all our species, in those tiny grey pebbles, polished and 
hard, that have earned the race its generic name of Stony-seed). 
L. prostratum has the flowers of L. fruticosum, but a prostrate habit 
that we all know well. The plant occupies Northern, Central, and 
South-eastern Spain, indifferent, it would seem, to lime or granite, 
but in the garden occasionally giving trouble in the matter, though 
while its best masses are usually associated with sandy and non- 
calcareous beds and gardens, some others, not inferior, have their soil 
so filled with chalk that its chunks have to be picked off the mats so 
as not to damage their effect. And yet other prolific patches are grow- 
ing in pure leaf-mould and mortar rubble, even as the wild types, 
so it is said, grow with the passionately lime-loving Daphne Cneorum 
among the limestone blocks about Biarritz. In any case, wherever 
the plant may do well, it is a point to remember that legginess is best 
controlled (alike for the clump’s happiness as for the gardener’s) by a 
drastic cutting-back, such as is applied to the Rock-roses. There 
are varying forms of L. prostratum, such as the glorious Heavenly 
Blue, which gives a just, if minimised, foretaste or sample of L. japont- 
cum ; and there either is, or soon will be, a white, for which we shall 
all tumble over each other to pay vast sums, but which will inevitably 
prove inferior to the coerulean loveliness of the type. 
L. purpureo-coeruleum blushes deeply blue in some rare copses of 
the West of England, a notable treasure, though often to be seen glowing 
like sapphires in the shady river-gullies of the Riviera, among dark 
brushwood and lushness of the ravine. In the garden this lovely thing 
is a ramper, and must only be put where it can do no harm ; for the 
long willowy sprays bend out, and take root at their tip, and so da 
capo all over the place—jump and sprawl, jump and sprawl, till 
nothing is left but the Lithospermum, and between the arches of the 
running sprays rise up on 6-inch stems the heads of large deep blossoms, 
purely sapphire in their true-blue splendour. 
L. rosmarinifolium is, in brief, a bright-green bush of Rosemary, 
which persists in putting forth clusters of azure stars in mid-winter, 
a trick it learned on its native rocks of Naples and Capri, and which 
it has never been able to unlearn under the different conditions of an 
English climate ; so that, for an English garden, L. rosmarinifolium, 
though in itself quite reasonably hardy, must be pronounced to be 
valueless except in so far as a stray bloom here and there, managing to 
slip out into beauty between two snowstorms and two deluges at the 
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