MECONOPSIS. 
IMeconopsis.*—The best thing for all parties concerned will be 
to give a compendium of all the twenty-eight possible species at 
present on record, almost all of which are ardently to be desired, and 
most especially cosseted when caught. Many different species will 
develop many differences of taste and temper; meanwhile, for the 
more difficult ones, the bed should be made in a sheltered place in a 
bay of shrubs, and after the prescriptions laid down at the beginning 
of Gentiana ; but it should have a soil-depth of at least 2 feet. The 
drainage-depth below should be another 15 inches, the water-pipe 
should be about 2 feet below the surface, and the soil should consist 
of two-thirds very coarse grit, and the rest a half-and-half mixture of 
peat and leaf-mould, plenty of rough sandstone being also dug in. 
They should share their ground happily with the more nervous Colum- 
bines, and will admit of much smaller beautiful fry in the way of the 
newest and rarest Asiatic Primulas, to say nothing of ground-fry, such 
as Linnaea and Mitchella. 
M. aculeata can be perennial or biennial or monocarpic. But, ~ 
whatever its powers of endurance may be, its powers of beauty take the 
breath. It stands about a foot or 16 inches high at the most, and 
the whole plant is of blue-grey tone, horrid everywhere with bristling 
hairs and spininesses. The leaves are irregularly feathered into notably 
deep rounded or pointed lobes (note this), and are on long footstalks, 
and bristle almost invariably on both sides. The flowers are borne 
on long footstalks, also, in a most graceful, loose spike ; and they are 
of noble size, four-petalled, of a crumpled pale-blue silk, filmed with 
a diaphanous iridescence of violet—against their golden spray of 
stamens a colour indescribable in its pure beauty, like a sky of dawn 
remembering very faintly the first touch of amethyst in which it died 
the night before. Nor do they seem to vary into worse tones with the 
copiousness of other blue Meconopsids. It is specifically quite close to 
M. horridula and M. rudis, wholly replacing the first in the North-wes- 
tern Himalaya. It differs from them in its leaves feathered into deep 
lobes, and from M. sinuata in its shorter pod. (See note to MW. sinuata.) 
And WM. latifolia beats it, both for beauty and constitution. 
M. bella makes a different departure ; this is a neat small tuft of 
fine foliage, which, fine ferny foliage and all, precisely suggests a small 
tuft of Papaver alpinum. Even so are the flowers borne, each on a 
footstalk springing straight from the stock (which grows so old and large 
and stout in the cliff that the root must clearly be perennial). There 
are four petals to each, and the delicate blooms are of delicate lovely 
blue. The plant, however perennial, yet needs the most careful care ; 
* For later information and the newer Meconopsids, see Appendix. 
