MULGEDIUM. 
glossy spiny foliage and tall spikes of labiate or acanthoid flowers 
in lively tones of pink, pink and white, or yellow. 
Morisia monanthos (formerly MU. hypogaea, but the older name 
takes precedence) is a most interesting little endemic Crucifer from 
Northern Corsica and Sardinia, where in sandy rocks and wastes at quite 
low elevations by the sea it makes wide tufts of brilliant and glossy- 
green foliage, suggesting an Aspleniwm viride with more pointed 
triangular leaflets; from which, nearly all the year, proceed almost 
stemless flowers of bright golden-yellow, each by itself on a stem of 
an inch or two. After flowering these reveal the curious idiosyncrasy 
of the plant, for they at once turn earthwards and bury their capsule 
underground, to incubate in earth. In cultivation Morisia grows 
easily and is quite hardy, but with an inclination to grow coarse and 
blowzy in good soil, developing its foliage until the effect of the con- 
tinuous flowers is lost, and the whole clump takes on a vulgar parvenu 
look which is not belied by its tendency, in such circumstances, to 
show its spoiled sybarised temperament and swelled head, by sulking 
unexpectedly off in the damps of winter. To prevent all these mis- 
fortunes, therefore, alike to cultivator and cultivated, it is best to 
treat Morisia sternly, sticking it into barren moraine in the sun, 
where it will not, indeed, grow so large, but will keep much flatter and 
neater and more refined in the rosette, while the erupting golden 
flowers have thus the full value of their brilliance, and hardly ever 
cease wholly to appear from the beginning of October till the end of 
May, and sometimes longer. The plant will come from seed, but even 
more profusely and promptly from root-cuttings laid in sand. It was 
introduced to us by seed from the Botanical Garden of Turin, and has 
held its own over here ever since; originally quoted from the Boni- 
facio district, where it is comparatively poor, the treasure was for a 
time clean lost, and omitted from the local Floras, until its abundant 
centres of distribution were discovered about Cap Corse, Stello, 
Arponi, &c., in the Northern part of the island, where it abounds in 
the plebeian low-lying sands that it affects. 
Mulgedium includes Lactuca, for the races are so closely allied 
as to be inseparably mixed. One of the most valuable is the smooth- 
leaved little Lactuca perennis of the Alps, where it may be found in 
dry hot places, sending up, from tufts of foliage rather like that of 
some large glaucous-grey Dandelion, a stem of a foot or two, branching 
into a loose head of pale china-blue Dandelions (in one very pretty 
form pure-white ones). This may be profusely raised from seed, and 
luxuriates perennially in a dry, hot, and worthless stony place. Closely 
similar is L. tenerrima, differing for the better in forming a thick bushy 
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