Anemones 



any use when the Crusaders were returning home de- 

 feated, determined some good should come of his enter- 

 prise and so filled his ships with earth from Palestine, 

 carried it to Italy, and filled the Campo Santo at Pisa with 

 it that the dead might lie in the holy soil. There within 

 those lovely cloisters the scarlet A. coronaria was seen for 

 the first time in Italy, having been imported with the soil 

 no doubt, but its appearance there was regarded as the result 

 of a miracle, and to typify anything the fertile fancy of 

 medieval monks might suggest about the blood of holy 

 martyrs shed on that soil. It is more pleasing to think of 

 the certain pleasure thus given to the living than of the 

 advantages that were imagined for the dead. The other 

 story has avillain for hero,a Dutch burgomaster who coveted 

 a magnificent strain of Anemones possessed and jealously 

 guarded by a burgher. Seed was refused to the great 

 man, so he plotted, arranged a visit to Mynheer's garden 

 at Anemone seed-time but before the harvest ; he arrived in 

 state and clad in his civic robes, and by cunningly allowing 

 his furred mantle to brush over the seed heads went home 

 with a plentiful supply of the fluffy seeds caught in the fur. 

 Now that I have written it out I perceive a second villain 

 in the tale, and cannot decide which was the worse, the thief 

 or the miserly gardener who refused to share his plants. 



I try to keep a little colony on the rock garden of the 

 Palestine A. coronaria, known as van syriaca. Like other 

 Palestine members of the family, Adonis and Ranunculus, 

 the type form is pure scarlet, and lacks the usual white eye. 

 I have had white forms, though, among collected roots. It 

 is a fine thing for a sunny rock bank, and especially glow- 

 ing if backed by grey stones and silvery-leaved things as I 

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