LYCHNIS. 
silky leafage 3 or 6 inches high, in which peer forth spikes of pale-blue 
blossom; L. Kingii, of the same comfortable habit, but with flowers 
more purple, and further advancing out of the tuft; L. monticola, a 
beautiful plant from alpine elevations in Wyoming, branched and 
bristled and grey, with silver-silky leaflets, and fine blossoms with broad 
wings of dark blue to a paler keel, the spike being some 2 inches long, 
to the plant’s branches of four or eight ; L. humicola, a spring flower 
from the undershrubby slopes of Wyoming, with many crowns from the 
branching root-stocks, and those crowded with the stalks of dead and 
gone leaves ; and then fresh branches of a foot or so in length, ending 
in a dense spike of blue, 4 to 8 inches long, with the flowers arranged 
in whorls; together with others yet a-many, beyond all hope of more 
than naming a few—LL. laxiflorus, Bakeri, ammophilus, barbiger, 
Wyethii, Burkei, ornatus, leucophyllus, ramosus, flecuosus, Greent, among 
which will no doubt be found in time many beaities equal or superior 
to those already recounted. 
Lychnis.—Let the border be concerned with great LL. bungeana, 
Coronaria, and chalcedonica, though even the mention of the two names 
side by side sickens the mind’s eye with the suggestion of Coronaria’s 
wide cups of claret-crimson velvet side by side with the huddled, 
shallow, and spiteful scarlets of L. chalcedonica. But L. Flos-Jovis 
is a gentler plant, with comfortable mild leafage of loose and ample 
silvered flannel, that may be seen here and there abundant in stony 
places of Cottian and Maritime granites, &c. ; adorning them with a few 
clustered large flowers of clear carmine pink on wool-white stems of a 
foot or 18 inches in summer. Next, for the bog garden and water-side, 
in warm sheltered exposures, and soil of perfect drainage, yet always 
rich and damp in summer, Japan has been inordinately generous 
with big Lychnids in the way of L. Haageana (itself a hybrid between 
L, fulgens and L. Coronaria), with its blazing royal blossoms of scarlet 
and vermilion in August on lax leafy stems of a foot or two. Even 
more superb is L. grandiflora, and the cry of magnificence goes still 
crescendo with L. Miqueliana, L. Senno, and L. laciniata, with its long 
long scarlet petals cut into long long radiating strips, stiff and narrow, 
of the most spidery effect, like the flowers of some colossal Ragged- 
Robin that have stiffened themselves up with a tonic, and then dipped 
themselves in fresh blood of a slaughtered Sun-god. L. fulgens and 
L. striata are in the same line of splendour, and none of these (except 
L. Haageana) have yet proved quite satisfactory or permanent in 
our general conditions, and evidently have yet to be further experi- 
mented with and satisfied before they become, as their beauty is 
bound to make them if revealed, the inevitable darlings of every fat- 
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