OF SHRUBS AND THEIR PLACING 23 



far, but makes a spider's web of growth, from which come 

 up the heads of deep pink flowers. This is a rare, new 

 species, but has no charm or preciousness to compare 

 with vaccinifolium. The equally rare P. sphaerostachyon 

 — though, by the way, this is frankly herbaceous, not a 

 shrub at all — is, to my taste, downright ugly — an un- 

 distinguished little plant eight inches high or more, 

 too leafy for its dull globes of rosy blossom. Half the 

 size of this, to continue my divagation, is om- own rare 

 native, P. viviparum, very similar, but much prettier, 

 with spikes of pearl-white flowers that produce their 

 young ones ready born. It is reported from our alpine 

 meadows to the east of Ingleborough, and I have found 

 it abundantly in upper Teesdale. In the garden it thrives 

 quite happily almost anywhere, even if it prove of no 

 very solid permanence. 



Returning to the greater, shrubby Knotweeds, they 

 are, for the most part, only fitted for the largest, wildest 

 garden, so commanding is their stature, so invasive and 

 violent their development. Polygonum saghalhiense is 

 the most really tropical of all our cultivated plants — and 

 this though it hails from so bleak and untropical a corner 

 of the world as the undesirable convict island which is 

 the contended bone between Russia and Japan. It rises 

 to twelve feet or more, in single arching boughs, clothed 

 with great leaves like magnified Hazel. It dies clean 

 down in winter, and runs vehemently about underground, 

 so that, in rich favourable, sheltered glades (in which 

 alone it can attain its fair development) it becomes the 

 most stately of weeds. Rather smaller in leaf, size, and 

 habit, is P. cuspidatum, which, instead of the single 

 sprays, sends up abundance of boughs from a yearly- 

 thickening central crown. This, no less easy and hardy 

 than saghalinen^e, is perhaps a safer plant to admit 

 within sight of the rock-garden — though in such choice 



