112 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
white Daphnes with a centre of varnished ruby-red buds. It is 
evidently poisonous as the rest of the family, for in the Tibetan 
hayfields the cattle pass it deliberately by, as they pass by butter- 
cups in England. Its seed is scanty and doubtful, and hard 
to catch ; it may not be sufficient for distribution. Young 
plants should be most carefully guarded from root-disturbance. 
[Abundantly collected on the Da-Tung Alps. 1915.] 
S teller a sp. (F 112) may just as easily be Wikstroemia or Farreria. 
It is a willow-leaved, brilliantly-green, sub-shrub of woody base, 
usually sprouting herbaceously to a height of about a foot, with 
undivided stems ending each in a loose thyrse of bright-yellow 
Daphne-flowers in June. On the hot bare loess downs, to which 
it is peculiar (I know of it only on the torrid hills of Siku, 
extending up to Lodani, and a little way up the Nan Ho), it is 
compelled to this habit by being pitilessly eaten back by the 
omnivorous goats ; where let alone I have seen it develop into 
a branching bush of some 3-4 feet. The seed drops while still 
its envelope is green, and though lavish in germination must be 
spared root-disturbance in later stages. 
Stephanandra sp. (F 54) abounds in all the subalpine coppices and 
hedgerows of the Border, especially in the Satanee region. It 
has all the elegance of its race—a gracious, beautiful-leaved 
shrub of 4-5 feet, with little terminal racemes of blossom in 
May-June, like a most delicate flesh-pale Ribes sanguineus. 
Swertia sp. (F 334) is but an annual, I fear, and may indeed be nothing 
more than a specially fine Asiatic development of Pleurogyne 
carinthiaca. It abounds in the open turf all over the upper alps 
of the Min S'an and Thundercrown, from 9,000 to 14,000 feet, 
and is really most beautiful in September, forming loose 6-8- 
inch pyramids of large, wide, saucer-shaped flowers of a lovely 
soft, clear, electric blue, growing in exactly the same turfy open 
slopes that breed Pleurogyne above the Glocknerhaus. But this 
is so attractive as well to deserve an annual sowing, in light grass 
or little interstices of turf. 
Syringa sp. (F 330) is a tall, slender, and very graceful Lilac of 6-8 
feet, which I have only once seen, far up, on the shady side in a 
collateral of the great Siku gorge, growing in a big colony amid 
blocks of mossy detritus from the cliff-wall overhead. Its flower, 
so far as I could judge it at the end of June, seemed small and 
rather poor, in small insignificant panicles ; it may, however, 
improve in cultivation. 
Syringa velutina (F 309). — As we escaped out of Satanee on a grey dawn 
in May, I saw, far down across the brawling little grey torrent, 
flaring purple masses of a Lilac on the sandstone cliffs that over- 
hang it. I believe and hope, though I cannot be certain, that 
to the same species belongs seed I collected from one tiny bush, 
growing in the same way, on a cliff, in the limestone gorge behind 
Gahoba, just over the neck. The seed, however, is too scant for 
