ANEMONE PRATENSIS.

(Meadow Anemone.)

THIS Anemone is perennial, and a native of Germany, where it grows in open fields, flowering in May. It was first cultivated by Mr. Millar, in the year 1731; and as we now find it in our gardens, it very much resembles the Anemone Pulsatilla. The principal distinctions between these species, as they grow naturally, are taken from the flower, which in the Anemone Pratensis is more pendulous, smaller, of a darker colour, and has the apices of the petals reflexed; the stem, also, is less hairy and shorter than that of the Pulsatilla. The Anemone, or Pasque flower, so called from its flowering about Easter, adorns some of our dry chalky hills with its beautiful purple flowers.. The garden Anemones, which are so ornamental to the flower borders in the spring, are only of two species, notwithstanding the variety of their colours. Art, to increase their beauty, has rendered them very large and double.

Baron Stoerck has recommended this plant as an effectual remedy for most diseases affecting the eye;

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and many German physicians have since tried its effects, and with success. Every part of this plant was recommended by Baron Stoerck for medicinal purposes. The flowers have scarcely any smell.

Class, POLYANDRIA.

Order, POLYGYNIA.

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THE ANEMONE.

SEE yon Anemones their leaves unfold,
With rubies flaming, and with living gold;
In silken robes each hillock stands arrayed.
Be gay! too soon the flowers of Spring will fade :
Ah! crop the flowers of pleasure while they blow,
Ere Winter hides them in a veil of snow.
Youth, like a thin Anemone, displays
His silken leaf, and in a morn decays.

SIR WM. JONES, from the Persian.

THE ANEMONE.

SHORT time ensued, till where the blood* was shed,
A flower began to raise its purple head;

Still here the fate of lovely forms we see,
So sudden fades the sweet Anemone :
The feeble stems to stormy blasts a prey,
Their sickly beauties droop and pine away;
Their winds forbid the flowers to flourish long,
Which owe to winds their name in Grecian song†.
EUSDEN, from Ovid.

FROM the soft wing of vernal breezes shed,
Anemones; auriculas enriched

With shining meal o'er all their velvet leaves;
And full ranunculus, of glowing red.

THOMSON.

*The ancient writers inform us, that Venus, in her grief for the loss of Adonis, mingled her tears with his blood; from whence sprang an Anemone, the first ever seen.

t Anemone is derived from the Greek avnuos, the wind; and hence is called the wind-flower.