OF ODD TREASURES 143 



flowered, has blossoms of a rich, hot, salmon-scarlet, and, 

 combined with the moonlit blue of G. F. Wilson and the 

 snowy chastity of Nelsoni, makes an unsurpassable tri- 

 colour of the most subtle yet blazing beauty — the more 

 so that the other rosy Phloxes have a taint of magenta. 



The large Natural Order of the Borages provides me 

 with a good number of easy things and a good number 

 of difficult ones too. To deal with the worst of these 

 first — there is only one Lithospermum, so far as I can 

 discover, that is really and truly a limestone plant. 

 Alas that I have never had the chance of proving Litho- 

 spermum erythrorhizon, whose big round flowers make the 

 copses below Nikko into the reflection of a cloudless sky 

 at dawn ! Lithospermum graminifoliwn grows liere very 

 affably, but too many of the others pine and languish, 

 even if I give them peat-soil and all the luxuries that 

 heart can desire. Among the languishers is azure pro- 

 stratum — rich in colour as any Gentian — that is such a 

 Meibuts' of sandy, Surrey gardens; as well as petraeum 

 and the dazzling, half-hardy rosmnrinifolium from sun- 

 baked sea-cliff's by Amalfi — so that of their beauty, 

 therefore, I dare not trust myself to tell, lest, like the 

 bereaved Achilles, I should speak the unhusbanded truth, 

 and melt into wild lamentations. But graminifolium is 

 a very dear and gracious plant, with many prostrate 

 branches, each terminating in a grassy rosette that sends 

 up in June a nodding head of lovely pale blue, tubular 

 flowers — in fact, though this plant has not the awful 

 brilliancy of the celestial Lithospermums, I console myself 

 by believing that it has even more tenderness of charm. 

 And the way it grows is a pure joy. 



With intcrm,edium, a hybrid, I believe, oi graminifolium, 

 I have had success ; the lovely Gastbni does well here ; 

 and purpureo-coeruleum, the rare Welsh native, is a fine 

 ramping thing, which has, at last, I don't know why, died 



