84 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
daintily beautiful exists in the race, as you see its great whirling 
heads poised delicately amid the fine grasses, the golden Gageas, 
the Fritillaries, and the innumerable purple Irids that enamel 
the grassy rocky ribs of Thundercrown. [No germinations yet. 
1916.] 
Meconopsis Psilonomma (F 255) is a much larger plant, of precisely 
similar habit, but that here the naked stem of 6-8 inches invariably 
carries only one very large flower, made up of some 6-7 broadly 
ovate waved petals of darker lavender-violet, making exactly 
the effect of big blooms of the purple Anemone coronaria. This, 
solider and less fairy-like than the last, has a stately and imposing 
magnificence. It lives in the thick high-alpine hay of one 
mountain slope only (so far as I could find) in the foothills of the 
Min S'an above Ardjeri, beginning about the upper limit of 
M. punicea at 11,000 feet, and ascending to the topmost crests at 
13,000, where, on the peaty ledges and in and out among tiny 
sere clumps of Rhododendron, it meets M. quintuplinervia, and 
reduces that dainty beauty to a wizen and anaemic pale cousin, 
with the voluminous flares of its own imperial splendour. It 
blooms in August, and seed was collected in quantity ; it must 
be remembered that this, like the last, is biennial. The seed, 
too, may possibly show a slight admixture of M. quintuplinervia 
and M. punicea, having been harvested by Chinese retainers 
during our own absence in the south. 
Meconopsis integrifolia (F 92) is very magnificent and portly in the 
highest turf of Thundercrown, standing stiffly up in early June 
with its huge lemon-pale globes in sumptuous but rather grace- 
less and gawky candelabra of colour. Here, as I say, it loves 
the long high-alpine hay at some 12,000-13,000 feet, and is found 
in no other situation but over all the great open flanks of the 
grassy slopes, where its bloom is at its height before the herbage 
is well up, while still the alps are sere and brown. No meadow, 
however, is too coarse for it ; and at its lower limit, at some 
75,000-80,000 feet, it luxuriates amid the coarsest tangle of tall 
Asters and Berberids — the Asters, in September, enclosing the 
huge upstanding pods of the Poppy in a lush jungle of leafage 
and blossom. 
Meconopsis quintuplinervia (F 118) is indeed a gracious and lovely thing, 
with its single bell-shaped flowers of softest lavender-blue swinging 
high upon their bare stems above the group of pale-haired, greyish 
foliage crowded in the turf below. The supremely important point 
about M. quintuplinerva, however, is that it is undoubtedly 
perennial, and thus forms a grand addition to the garden, where 
there are as yet few certainly perennial Meconopsids except M. 
grandis and M. cambrica. This beautiful treasure inhabits the 
finer (as a rule) alpine turf of the Kansu-Tibet border, between 
9,000 and 13,000 feet. We first met it, still dormant, amid the 
snows on Chago-ling ; on Thundercrown and all up the Min S'an it 
