188 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 



The Cimicifugas never attract me very much; their 

 glossy, elder-like foliage is very handsome, and effective 

 too are the long bottle-brush spikes of white that they 

 send up to the height of five feet or more — some in early 

 summer, and others at intervals on into late autumn. 

 Davurica, I fancy, is the handsomest, and all thrive with 

 the most unexacting ease in any cool soil. But they have 

 something a little coarse and rank about them, to my 

 taste — perhaps a hinted warning of the poison that lurks 

 in all their being. It is fortunate that poison-plants 

 seldom if ever fail to offer some such indication of their 

 nature to the sensitive observer. Who would take Atroj)a, 

 Hyoscyamus, or fatal Hellebore, for ordinary benign, 

 innocent creatures ; or fail to feel an intuition of evil 

 about Monkshood, Foxglove, and Daphne mczereon ? 

 And the Cimicifugas, like their rare native cousin, Actaea 

 spicata, are too unmistakably ominous in appearance to 

 have the full attraction of their beauty. 



The Loosestrife, on the other hand, is plain but respect- 

 able, to set against the bad prettiness of the Baneberries. 

 I call Lythruvi salicaria plain, perhaps cruelly and with- 

 out justice, but its profuse spikes of flowers have a 

 lacerating crudity of magenta that destroys everything 

 else within a radius of a hundred yards, kills all the joy of 

 one's eye, and quite disqualifies the Loosestrife, handsome 

 and blameless as it is, for any place in the careful and 

 selected garden. I had it once, by accident, next to a 

 flaming orange mass of Montbretia Pottsii. Shrieks fail 

 utterly to paint the horror of that jangle, ' which fiddle- 

 strings is weakness to expredge my nerves ' when I recall 

 it. The other, true Loosestrifes — LysimacMa, not Lythrum 

 — are useful, tall coarse things for the distance, for remote 

 places with which we do not more closely concern our- 

 selves. 



Spigelia marilandica is an American from southerly 



