MECONOPSIS. 
its home is at some 12,000 to 14,000 feet in the Eastern Himalaya, 
where, unlike its larger kindred, it grows only in the hardest crevices 
of the rock, and never in the loose soil of the slopes below. 
M. cambrica—The Welsh Poppy is a sad exile from all the rest 
of its family. Many thousand miles now lie dividing it from the nearest 
Meconopsis in Asia. However, it must have taken the step long 
since, and the sadness of separation has evidently been wiped out by 
having everything its own way here without any rivalry by relations, 
until late years. There is an enriched orange-coloured single form of 
this lemon-coloured weed, and a double yellow, and another double 
of a vermilion-orange, so intense as to be quite beautiful. Even the 
duplicity becomes bearable,and the plant is true from seed in a strangely 
large percentage of cases. Of the rock-garden, however, the Welsh 
Poppy is so appreciative that it very soon becomes a pest there. Its 
admission is almost tantamount to a confession of weakness on the 
gardener’s part, or, at best, of a catholic charity so complete as to 
verge upon the maudlin. And yet, and yet—M. cambrica is always 
so charming ! 
M. chelidonifolia ; a stately 4-foot perennial for peaty ground, 
very freely branching, and hanging out delicate egg-shaped buds that 
expand into flat four-petalled flowers of crimpled pale-yellow silk on 
stems as fine as wire, spraying from stems and branches that turn dark- 
brown and almost black. The foliage is tri-lobed, and the pods almost 
hairless. It grows easily, and may be divided in spring; blooms in 
July, and develops young plants from bulbils formed on the pegged- 
down stems. 
M. crassifolia—An American annual, about 10 inches high, and 
properly profuse with orange flowers, having a purple eye at the base 
of each petal. This, with M. heterophylla, may be sown broadcast 
in light soil in full sun. 
M. Delavayi first appeared in public at the Chelsea Show of 1913. 
It is a most exquisite creature, though almost certainly only biennial or 
monocarpic. All its leaves are at the base, narrow, rather glaucous- 
green, and smooth on the upper surface, long-stalked and rather 
rhomboidal in outline. Up come the firm little stems of some 6 or 8 
inches, almost wholly smooth, each carrying one large half-nodding 
flower of the most glorious shimmering imperial violet, with a central 
tassel of brilliant golden anthers. It sometimes has some six or eight 
petals, and more usually the fashionable four. This jewel is native to 
the stony turf in and out among scant small bushes at the foot of 
the limestone precipices in Yunnan, and up to the snowy passes of 
Likiang. 
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