340 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
the stretches of the river shingles, from the Si-ning Hor and the Da- 
Tung Hor, is remarkably handsome, with stalwart tufts of silky, grey- 
green foliage, and large, stout heads of very brilliant purple flowers 
in May and June ; the second shares the same tastes, and is so exactly 
suggestive of 0. pyrenaica that I hesitate to promise a distinct species 
in this tangled and minutely-differentiated race ; while the third flops 
in frail elegance horn the loess-cliff s, in a veil of small pale lavender 
blossom in June. 
Papaver nudicaule (F 687) is wild, in a very pretty orange form, 
in the screes of the Kweite Range ; but I never saw it in the Da-Tung, 
and could get no certain seed. What I send is the form cultivated in 
the gardens of all the local abbeys, possibly hailing, in its remote 
origin, from a source as distant as Reading, but a fine brilliant develop- 
ment, often running to double flowers of blazing scarlet-orange. 
Phaca sp. (F 705) is an unusually brilliant thing, of quite uncertain 
name. On the highest alps of the Da-Tung, and in the uppermost 
rocks, its fine tufts of ferny foliage nestle, and up come spikes of eight 
inches or so, in July, laxly clothed in blossoms of blazing rose-crimson 
which lift it very high among the rare Pea-flowers desirable for the 
rock-garden. Equally uncertain in its attribution to Phaca is F 738, 
from the same sweeps of alpine turf, but evidently another species, 
hardly so brilliant as the last and not so striking, but yet with qualities 
and charms. This more recalls Phaca astragalina of our own Alps. 
Potentilla Purdomii (F 517) was not known by this name till I saw 
it thus labelled at Chelsea Show in 1916. Evidently Purdom had got 
it unbeknownst, on his former expedition for Veitch. We certainly 
both thought of it as Geum in 1915, when we came upon it gilding the 
greener level stretches of flat and rather damp lawn high in the upmost 
sweeps of the alps with a solid sheet of its yellow flowers. Individu- 
ally the flowers are not, as a rule, large enough for the length of their 
stems, but their abundance makes up for this, and the profusion of 
the stems themselves. They are eight or nine inches long, spraying 
all round the rosette of lovely foliage, weakly lying out and ascendent, 
producing a violent glare of gold with the unanimity of their abundant 
blossom. In the specimen exhibited by Mr. Allgrove the stems 
were much more erect than I have ever seen them in nature, and the 
whole effect by no means what it was in the sunlit flats of the alps. 
My own seed, however, was sedulously collected from only those forms 
marked down in bloom as having the largest flowers and the most of 
them. Massed, accordingly, in conducive spots, I expect this plant 
to prove a favourite. 
Primula Farreri (F 560) is the grand novelty of the season in this 
or any other race. It haunts only the dark and sunless crannies in the 
highest sunless combes of the Da-Tung summits, whether on limestone 
or granite, and is a magnificent species of the Nivalis group, thick- 
stocked as any leek, with large dark foliage, heavily powdered with 
white meal beneath, and large clusters, just emerging on eight-inch 
scapes, of very large flowers, of intense fragrance, pale lavender blue* 
