HIEÎIACIUM villosum.
Shaggy Alpine HawkweecL
SYN&ENESIA Polygamia-cequalis.
G en. Char, jRecept. nearly naked, dotted. Cal. imbricated,
ovate. Down simple, sessile.
Spec. Char. Stem leafy, slightly branched. Leaves
wavy or toothed, rough with long hairs; the radical
ones lanceolate; the rest ovate or oblong.
Syn. Hieracium villosum. Linn. Sp. PI. 1130. Sm.
FI. Frit. 833. With. 687. Hull. ed. 2 . 232.
Dicks. Tr. of Linn. Soc. v. 2 . 288. Jacq. Austro
t. 87.
H. quintum villosum. Clus. Hist<v. 2 . M l . Ger.
em. 301.
F e w plants, in our British list, are more involved in obscurity
than H. villosum, whose synonyms were misapplied
by Ray and Dillenius to our alpinum, t. 1110. Native specimens
of villosum we have never seen, that in our plate, though
originally brought from Ben Lawers, having flowered in a
garden, under the care of the late Mr. J . Mackay. It is certainly
much more luxuriant, and branched from the base,
than any of our native Swiss specimens, but the latter show
this species to be extremely variable. Characteristic marks of
it are the copious long shaggy hairs, bulbous at their base;
the lanceolate stalked radical leaves, either wavy or toothed,
whose under side has a pale and glaucous hue ; and the large
lemon-coloured flowers, solitary at the top of each stem or
branch, whose numerous narrow acute dark calyx-scales are
somewhat glaucous, and excessively hairy. The stem-leaves
in our Scottish specimens are oblong and narrow; those of
the foreign ones ovate, at least in part, which raises more
doubt in our minds than any other circumstance. So much
still remains to be done in this genus, that we pretend not to
perfect certainty.
The plant before us has a woody perennial root, and flowers
in August. The seed-down is rough, and rather short.