MAIANTHEMUM BIFOLIUM. 
prudent tongue of botanists as making the glory of the alpine rocks 
on Chelmos, the Bithynian Olympus, Aslandagh, Berytagh, and 
many another favoured mountain in Transcaucasia and the Cilician 
Taurus. Here it hangs, in fat scaly stocks that emit a quantity 
of very long narrow leaves, dense and hoary-grey with pressed-down 
bristles, among which appear a number of leafy stems 6 inches or a 
foot high, bearing at their end a stout head as large as an egg, of nobly 
frank wide flowers of golden yellow. There are few specimens of this 
as yet in England, and fewer yet successful ones ; it must have a hot 
place jammed between firm rocks, with a rooting medium behind 
down into a perfectly-drained depth of poor gritty pebbly stuff with a 
little enrichment of loam and leaf-mould. 
M. cyanochroa, in the cliffs of Southern Persia, makes tufts of 
narrow foliage 2 or 3 inches long and harshly bristly ; among these, and 
hardly any longer, appear a number of stems with short heads of 
bright-blue blossom. 
M. densiflora stands very close indeed to M. Cephalotes in its whole 
habit and beauty and needs, coming even from the same region of 
Transcaucasia. It differs, however, in being much more silky, and 
with silk, too, that becomes tawny toward the upper parts of the 
stems; it also has clusters of wide bowl-shaped yellow flowers in the 
upper axils of the leaves, no less than in the main bunch at the top. 
M. echioeides——This is the well-known Prophet-flower, the one 
member of its family to be popular in gardens (and even in borders), 
forming masses of green narrow rough foliage, and abundant in 9-inch 
stems in June, carrying bunches of blossoms like glorified cowslip- 
heads of yellow, with a black spot at the base of all five lobes, which 
spots, however unlike black marks in other walks of life, fade away 
as the flower grows older and wiser, till at last it reaches a reverend 
old age of unsullied lemon-colour. 
M. guttata, from the Siberian Altai, has dense one-sided spikes 
about 9 inches high, and yellow blooms very widely expanded and 
spotted with black at the base of each lobe as in M. echioides. 
M. perennis has smaller flowers than these last, and blue-purple 
in colour. 
Maianthemum bifolium is that specially beloved little fairy of 
the alpine woods, with two glossy heart-shaped leaves on fine stems 
of 3 inches or so, and between them an upstanding fluffy plume of 
pure-white in May or June. Even so may it be seen in one or more 
woods in the North of England, and in the garden is an invaluable 
delight for any cool soil or place, running about and forming wide 
glossy carpets that look especially well if they be threaded through 
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