My Garden in Spring 



tradition a form of pyrenaica, but quite unlike it in appear- 

 ance and habit, as here pyrenaka increases so freely it 

 requires frequent thinning to get a good flowering, but 

 this yellow beauty is very slow to spread. A single bulb 

 given me by Dr. Lowe, who told me he had it from Miss 

 Hope of -Edinburgh, has in twenty years only trebled 

 itself. Very much like it in build, but with a pleasing 

 dull crimson bell, F. gracilis is both rare and beautiful. 

 It came to me through a kind friend who travels to strange 

 out-of-the-way places and often sends me unusual plants 

 from distant lands. This one has a very limited range in 

 certain Montenegrin woods, but is making itself happy in 

 this rock garden, and seeds so freely I hope it will soon 

 grace many others. Several forms of our native Snake's 

 Head, in fact as many as I can get, find welcome here 

 even the curious double form, that looks like a bunch of 

 fragments of the marbled cover of the exercise books we 

 used in our schoolroom days. The pure white is my 

 favourite of all, and I like to see it rising out of Erica 

 carnea as well as anywhere, and it appears to like such 

 company too, and seeds freely there. The curious narrow- 

 belled form known as var. contorta is worth growing. I 

 only knew of the white until recently, when I saw a good 

 stock of the mottled type in a Dutch nursery, so now I 

 grow both, but the white is the more attractive ; the 

 squared shoulders of the type have disappeared, and the 

 long, tubular, white flower is very graceful. This cylin- 

 drical aberration has been noted as occurring among the 

 normal form at Wulfshagen, and has been observed to be 

 too narrow to admit the humble bees which are the chief 

 insect visitors of this species, but further evidence is 

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