COLLECTIONS OF 191 4. 
91 
blend of every shade of saffron, sulphur, and cream — it being 
specially noted that the paler forms were perceptibly paler and 
greyer in the seed-husk than the rich brown of the yellower 
forms. All these should make masses of lovely small tight 
bushes, and deserve to be planted in big sweeps amid grass on 
the fringes of woodland and shrubbery, where in August they 
ought to mimic snow and gorse as they do on the cool green 
mountains of Tibet. 
Potentilla bifiora (F 214) is a real gem of a very different kidney. It 
belongs only to the highest-alpine earth-pans and cliffs on the 
crests of the Min S'an and Thundercrown at 14,000-15,000 feet, 
where on the bald bare loam it forms tight massive hassocks, 
often a yard across, of bright lucent-green foliage, so finely divided 
and curled as to make the effect of some hairless glossy small Saxi- 
frage of the Ceratophylla group, amassed into a tight hard dome. 
So the plant grows, from a thick woody trunk ; and in mid- July 
the whole hump is covered with a galaxy of almost stemless 
single little golden stars, in shape and size and colour like those 
of a diminished P. verna, with a blotch of orange at the base of 
each citron-yellow petal. This compact beauty, in fact, makes 
a golden third in a trinity with pink P. nitida and snowy P. 
Clusiana, though even tighter and harder in its masses than 
P. nitida. [It germinated with me, but then all miffed off : kept 
too warm and moist probably.] 
Primula. — In this great race 1914 has been delightfully fertile, the 
Nivalis-Maximowiczii group being especially well represented. 
Several most interesting extensions of races or groups have 
been recorded, and I cannot help suspecting that Nos. 1, 6, 5, 
10, 13, 15, 22, 23 may prove to be good new species. So far as 
I can discern, the season has yielded twenty-five species, new or 
old, though perhaps one or two of these may fade into others, and 
certainly there are more than one concealed under No. 19. 
Primula hylophila sp. nov. No. 1 (F 38) should certainly belong to the 
Davidi group, but that it utterly lacks the brown investiture of 
scales, and in all its habit and habits precisely repeats P. acaulis, 
with clumps of crisp, crinkly, sharp-toothed leaves, with pale veins, 
a lettuce-like succulency, and a microscopic veneer of green- velvet 
glands. From this rises a scape of 2-4 inches, bearing a loose Poly- 
anthus head of large and lovely rose-mauve flowers in March, with 
a ten-rayed eye of green and white from the pale throat. Not 
only does this plant repeat the tufts of the Primrose, but it also 
occupies the typical Primrose-sites in all the forests from Chago- 
ling to the gorges of Thundercrown, between 7,000 and 8,000 feet, 
growing in the opener places of the woodland, by path-sides, on 
lightly-coppiced banks, or in the wide flat stretches of Anemone 
nemorosa, dappling the ground beneath deciduous trees. It loves 
the clammy, rich loam of the Primrose, too, but especially luxuri- 
ates in rotten timber, forming magnificent crowded colonies in the 
