OF SHRUBS, MOSTLY EVERGREEN 37 



cullina. Whether these are all names of one or of dis- 

 tinct sorts I dare not dispute. Let me call my plant 

 collina, and so praise it. It grows in any soil, quite 

 robustly, though sometimes a branch dies off for no clear 

 reason. It develops into a round bush of small, leaden, 

 evergreen foliage, three feet high or so, and each straight 

 shoot is capped, in June, by a head of deliciously-scented 

 rosy-pink flowers, like those of kidica. 



Daphne Genkwa is an outstanding, notable kind, very 

 rare in cultivation. It hails from China and Southern 

 Japan, and labours, consequently, under a reputation for 

 doubtful hardiness. As a matter of fact, I imported my 

 plants from the Tokio Plain, with the result that they 

 turn out able to stand anything in the way of weather. 

 A pot-plant, in the open, suffers far more, of course, from 

 frost, than does a plant whose roots are safely buried in 

 the ground, with only one surface to feel the cold. Last 

 winter a number of Japanese Plums, even, in pots, were 

 killed off by frost; not a single pot-plant of Daphne 

 Genkwa took any hurt. This plant, economically impor- 

 tant in the manufacture, I fancy, of paper, is a small, 

 very frail, straggling shrub, deciduous, with thin, velvety, 

 greyish leaves. The bark is soft, dark brown. The 

 flowers, born in few-flowered clusters before the leaves, 

 are larger than those of any other Daphne, and of a 

 very clear, beautiful, blue-purple, like those of a fine lilac. 

 Of Daphne striata, a close cousin oicneorum, and reported 

 a lime-lover, my imported plants turned out, after all, to 

 be mere coUma; Daphne arbuscula is a very rare little 

 novelty, quite easy to do with, in peat, which seems to 

 me exactly like a minute form of cneorum with the 

 diminutiveness, but without the gorgeous blossom, of 

 rupestris. 



With Laureola, Philippi, Sophiae — the dingy, greenish 

 yellowish Daphnes, no rock-garden need concern itself. 



