Il8 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



spectabilis has crept an aniline touch from the less pure and vivid 

 colour of minima. Here again, though, forms do vary, and search 

 will procure one intensely rosy hybrids, solid-flowered after the orbed 

 and hearty beauty of spectabilis. The rarer of the two crosses is 

 minima > spectabilis, P. x Dumoulini, much the closer to minima and yet 

 cosier in its habit, rounder in the single bloom it carries close to the 

 ground on an invisible scape, than is minima < spectabilis or P. x 

 Facchinii, much nearer to spectabilis, but rather ragged in the blooms 

 it carries by pairs (sometimes by threes, even as the generally uniflorous 

 Juribella occasionally carries two blooms) on a scape of an inch or so. 

 It will be noticed that in all these crosses it is clear that minima is 

 invariably the mother. I know no Arthritic hybrid which suggests 

 that minima has been the fecundating parent until we come to the 

 next cross, the last and most gorgeous of this section. For P. x inter- 

 media, Portenschlag, alone of this cross-bred race, seems to inherit the 

 best qualities of either parent, and carry them to a higher power. 

 It has a neat compact habit of tufted, spinulous-looking rosettes in 

 a single clump, derivable from minima, though much larger, and it 

 also has the taller scape and the enormous, brilliant rosy blossoms of 

 Clusiana, unspoiled and unweakened. It is a most beautiful and 

 recommendable plant on all counts, for where the other Arthritica 

 X Chamaecallis crosses are easy enough to grow, P. x intermedia is not 

 only as hearty and thrifty as a cowslip, whether in moraine or loam 

 or peat, but it is also among the most free-flowering Primulas that we 

 possess. It has a curious tendency to throw roots along the surface 

 of the ground with me — perhaps a reminiscence of minima's roving 

 habits. And P. x intermedia is, to my thinking, quite definitely Clusiana 

 X minima, a clear cross of minima on to an Arthritic Primula, instead of 

 by one. Close by, however, to the one little patch of a few square yards 

 on the Hochschneeberg where alone I have collected P. x intermedia 

 (and its forms are diverse, in length and breadth and even in dentation 

 of leaf ; for sometimes you come on larger developments, in which — 

 unless they be in flower, and I have never yet seen wild intermedia in 

 flower — only a rare jag or two round the leaf's end remains to remind 

 you that you are not looking at pure P. Clusiana in some diminished 

 version) there is also a large colony so radically different in style and 

 habit from intermedia that here I believe the variation is specific, and 

 that this is the reverse-cross, minima x Clusiana. Of its flowers I 

 cannot yet speak, but the plant is very much smaller than P. x inter- 

 media and in foliage recalls P. x Dumoulini, though perhaps a trifle 

 larger ; even as its habit of growing in wide, dense mats and ramifying 

 colonies stands towards minima's carpet-habit very much as do the 

 laxer ramifying tufts of P. x salisburgensis. This also seems, as so 

 often, to have spread from its original focus over a small space of 

 moor ; and elsewhere, as I have said, you may tramp the Styrian 

 limestones across many a springing mile of Dianthus alpinus, Cam- 

 panula alpina, Viola alpina, P. Clusiana and P. minima, and Petro- 

 callis pyrenaica without ever setting eyes on P. X intermedia or any other 



