MERTENSIA. 
opalescent bugles of pink and blue, yet they are not large enough 
quite to redeem the leafiness of the plant, which accordingly has a 
lush rankness that banishes it from beds where VM. pulmonarioeides 
would be an eagerly-pressed visitor. And see M. Drummondit. 
M. coriacea (M. perplexa) has a stature not exceeding a foot, and 
the stems are set with crowded leathery leaves, and arise from tufts 
of the same, all smooth and with their blades longer than their stalks. 
The flowers are blue tubules and are borne in dense heads. There is 
also a more widespread varicty, M.c. dilatata. (Alpine region of the 
Rockies.) 
M. coronata has large roots that justify themselves by emitting 
large tufts of many large leaves, finely roughish on the upper surface ; 
amid these proceed stalwart shining stalks of some 14 inches, more 
or less, carrying loose open showers of ample blue blossoms. 
M. cynoglossoeides is a depressed plant, with stems of some foot or 
18 inches, that can only rise to a few flowers, broad in the tube. 
M. davurica has passed into a noble and regretted memory, and 
not even in botany books can any gleam of its blue beauty be re- 
captured. It is one of the loveliest of all, bald below, but almost hoary 
with close-pressed down above, with the same coating on the upper 
side of the stalked basal leaves, which are usually smooth beneath. 
The flowers are borne almost in showers on stems of 9 inches or so— 
nodding lovelinesses of azure whose sprays ultimately elongate till 
they stand erect. It dwells in the sub-alpine fields of Davuria and 
Baikal, and once was known in English gardens too. 
M. denticulata is smooth and blue-grey, with an almost unbranching 
stem. 
M. Drummondii is a dwarf and very beautiful form of M. ciliata, 
redeeming all the faults of its parent by being itself an alpine treasure, 
neat and stunted and large-flowered, revealing its charms along 
the frozen coasts of Arctic seas. This too has borne the name of 
M. alpina. 
M. echioeides is by now well known and dearly prized. It is a 
green and softly-hairy plant, with stems of 6 or 9 inches that continue 
unfolding their croziers of rich pure-sapphire flowers through the 
later summer, and may be relied on unfailingly to decorate and occupy 
any decent corner in deep rich soil not parched or burnt. It may be 
known in any case of doubt by the corolla-lobes, that are erect and not 
refleced ; with the anthers, too, protruding. (High Himalaya.) It 
has nothing at all to do with M. lanceolata, sometimes sent out as if 
it were a synonym or variety. 
M. elliptica comes from Kamchatka, and of this it may be said 
487 
