MECONOPSIS. 
M. discigera grows in the high meadows of Western Sikkim. Its 
habit is that of a rather close spike about a foot high, with big weary- 
looking flowers in flushed unhealthy combinations of blue and crimson: 
and the leaves are specially numerous, in dense upstanding star-fishes 
of grey-green with glaucous-grey reverse, long-stalked, hairy, oblong 
and lobed, or coarsely toothed at the tips. As with M. bella and 
M. quintuplinervia, the abundance of dead leaves and stout old stocks 
gives hope of permanence for the plant. 
M. grandis; a yard-high perennial, with a basal rosette of narrow 
oval leaves roughly toothed and downy like the whole growth. Similar 
leaves clothe the stems, almost forming into whorls as they go higher, 
and in these whorls the stem produces auxiliary buds. Finally, from 
the crowded leaves of the upmost whorl escape the several long bare 
flower-stems, each carrying a stately cup-shaped bloom of handsome 
size—about 4 or 5 inches across—and varying in colour from rich 
violet and clear-blue to duller slatier tones, as is too often the way of 
the blue Meconopsids (so that it is wisest to get seed from a pure colour 
among the monocarpics, and with a perennial to pick out your plant 
in blossom). It is a common beauty in the high meadows of Western 
Sikkim. Picture this as a big blue-flowered and perennial replica of 
M. integrifolia. 
M. Henrict. See under M. lancifolia. 
M. heterophylia is another annual of Pacific North America. It is 
nearly allied to M. crassifolia, but taller, more drawn out, and rather 
less free in the flowers, which are of scarlet-orange with a black blotch at 
the base of each petal, and a most delicious scent of Lily of the valley. 
M. horridula stands very close to M. aculeata, but differs finally 
and absolutely from Aculeata, Racemosa, and all others of its cloudy 
group, by having no uprising trunk at all, but single ample blue flowers, 
almost pendulous, with some five-eight petals, borne each by itself on a 
bare stalk of some 8 inches. In other respects the habit is as in M. acu- 
leata, but there is a most important difference, in that the leaves, instead 
of being feathered into lobes, are nearly, if not quite, entire, in their 
rather narrow outline. 'The number of petals, too, separates it from the 
invariably four-petalled M. aculeata, which it replaces in the highlands 
of Central Asia, Sikkim, and Tibet, being best taken in reality asa 
form of M. racemosa, in which the central stem does not develop. 
The character seems fluctuating and insecure. 
M. integrifolia differs from M. grandis only in having yellow 
flowers and the leaves always perfectly wntoothed and uncut at the 
edge, and very hairy underneath ; this glorious plant, with its huge 
lemon-pale globes, will therefore give us our best imagination of M. 
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