Alpines and Bog-Plants

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Hammculacm, papateraceae, Cruciferae I Am tired, I declare, of waiting for my herbaceous Clematises to bloom. I had integrifolia and Fremonti from seed, under promise of splendours to come; yet though I have nursed them for years I have never seen a bloom. Erecta, though, and the larger heracleaefolia are fine, handsome herbaceous plants, leafy and large, with abundance of flower-clusters, like masses of wee blue Hyacinths. As for the large climbing species of this notable race, they have no place in the rock-garden, unless you have a vast space to cover, and trees for them to make a jungle of. This is just where both my gardens fall short, so that I have never, except in the ordinary garden, been able to use beautiful things like Clematis grata, Henryi, tangutica, Viticella, Jackmanni, and laniiginosa, all of which should make a foaming background of white and gold and violet to the huge block- built rockery that slopes up to a brow of coppice or wood. However, if I lack Clematis, I have Atragene; and Atragene is to all practical purposes indistinguishable from Clematis. My plants of the American Atragene verticillata are yet but young; the European Alpina, however, gives me more and more delight every year. It is a slight trailer, and I have found it, in seed, meandering among the bushes in the Maritime Alps, just below the level of the Primulas. In early summer it produces blue or lilac flowers, large, cross-shaped, but very like a Clematis. This dear little creeper has a splendid Albino form; and both thrive easily on any sunny rockery (I daresay they would thrive in shade quite as well) in any cool, sound loam. On the heels of Clematis must come Anemonopsis?in flower so like Atragene, yet so different in every other way. Anemonopsis macrophylla is a si...