Page:Curtis's Botanical Magazine, Volume 73 (1847).djvu/65

 stamens than any known species. We do not despair of seeing this plant ere long in our greenhouses.

. Root a creeping caudex, thicker than the finger. Leaves chiefly radical, or from the very base of the stem, and fasciculate, sheathing, equitant, linear-ensiform, acuminate, striated, quite glabrous, shorter than the stem, much tinged with brown-purple. Stem erect, herbaceous, angled and furrowed, two to four feet high, bearing three or four leaves, similar to those of the stem, the uppermost less equitant. This stem branches above, and becomes a panicle, dichotomously divided, with a small leaf-like bractea at the forks, clothed with a dense dark-red brown or sooty, coloured tomentum, which, when seen under a microscope, is found to consist of beautiful plumose hairs. The ultimate branches, or peduncles of the panicle, bear a spike of large, tomentose, lemon-coloured flowers, the lower portion of the flower and the ovary being covered with the same fuliginose tomentum as the panicle, but which gradually becomes more scattered and inconspicuous towards the upper portion of the flower. Ovary globose. Perianth with the tube slightly curved, scarcely an inch long, a little dilated upwards; the mouth very oblique; the limb of six spreading lanceolate acuminate segments (clothed within, as well as without, with pale yellow tomentum), which are much longer, especially the upper ones, than the tube. Filaments subulate, as long as the segments of the perianth, their bases united into a membrane, or ring, at the mouth of the tube. Anthers small, oblong, pale-coloured, tipped with a small blunt mucro. Style longer than the corolla. Stigma clubbed.