Primulas 



pays rent all the year in fact. I have a rather interesting 

 set of named forms with widely-differing shapes of leaves 

 and the much-praised garden form Mrs. Hall Walker, 

 whose flowers I have not seen yet, but have great hopes of 

 them next season founded upon the present fatness of the 

 central crown. I spent a very happy day up in the 

 Cottian Alps this last June collecting some lovely forms, 

 and hope to make a good planting as soon as I can get 

 them out of the sand frame where they are making their 

 new roots after being pulled to bits. 



I once thought I did not greatlycare for Alpine Primulas, 

 they seemed to me so much given to thin magenta colour- 

 ing, but a few weeks among them in Tyrol, with Mr. 

 Farrer as interpreter of their charms, converted me, and 

 he likes to remind me of my declaration that I should not 

 collect more than two or three of each and the contra- 

 dictory reality of the full tins I carried on my poor old 

 back down those mountain sides. A few of the purple, 

 almost blue, bells of P. glutinosa on the Venna Thai en- 

 lightened me, and a mountain side rosy-purple for a mile 

 or more with P. spectabilis in full bloom, as a Scotch hill- 

 side might be with heather, finished the work. But then 

 both in their native hills are revelations of what Primulas 

 can be. Picking out the largest white-eyed forms of spec- 

 tabilis and selecting the most rosy and least aniline I found 

 as fascinating as any bit of collecting I had ever done. 

 Just picture to yourself a turfy mountain side, worn by 

 weather and sheep, or goats, into countless horizontal 

 miniature terraces such as one often finds in a steep bit of 

 the South Downs, and under the brow of each terrace 

 fancy clumps of a dozen to twenty rosettes of a green- 

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