Plants You Should Hate

Gentiana brevidens is a floppet of the worst—a vast leafy great weakly rubbish with tight heads of little and insignificant bluish stars in August, ridiculous at the end of those stalwart stems and wide wrappings of oval slack-textured foliage.

Cypripedium tibeticum is a small squat thing, rather like a malignant Tibetan toad in appearance (no less than in character) when it produces its single stumpy stolid flower of immense size, on a stem of some 3 or 4 inches. For this is an evil-looking, hoody sullenness, with broad straight segments and bulging lip, the whole being of a whitish tone, but densely striped all over with lines of purple-black, while the bag is almost entirely of the same lurid tone. In cultivation, however, it avoids this condemnation by very rarely growing well enough to show those flowers at all.

Veronica alpina deserves prosecution for its false pretences. Under this name we expect something better than this particularly dingy small weed with its large hairy pairs of oval leaves on the weak creeping stems of 2 or 3 inches, that end in a parsimonious little parcel of diminutive flowers in a pale lymphatic shade of slaty-blue. V. nivalis is another of the valueless little dirty sad-blue Squinnies.

Engravings by Abigail Rorer for Mimpish Squinnies: Reginald Farrer's Short Guide to Worthless Plants (Lone Oak Press, 2007). Descriptions by Reginald Farrer (1919).