July 



IRISH GARDENING, 



99 



up on stems of a considerable heig-ht. Its 

 leaves are striped and grassy like. R. Lloyd 

 Praeger speaks of it in the following terms : — 

 " A little plant with grassy, submerg-ed leaves, 

 and a button-like head of greyish flowers, this 

 little hydrophyte constitutes a very great 

 puzzle. It proves to be a pipewort, a North 

 American species unknown on the continent of 

 Europe, and it ranges up and down the west 

 coast of Ireland, and re-appears sparingly in the 

 west isles of Scotland. Elsewhere it is confined 

 exclusivelv to the Northern L^S.A. and Canada." 



We surveyed the country in that day's travel 

 and retraced our footsteps the following morn- 

 ing, gathering up the gems "en route." For 

 fully thirty miles we were accompanied by 

 Dryas octopetala, just a garland of snow white 

 splendour. Such luxuriance of foliage, with its 

 deep-sea green, with none of those burnt, 

 struggling appearances it presents in cultiva- 

 tion, the Mountain Avens stands as an isolated 

 beauty, and raises the admiration of the horti- 

 culturist to unlimited bounds, to say nothing 

 of what a botanist would discover on closer 



Photo l>y] 



Saxifraga Stkrnhergh at Homr on Coast ok Cointv Clare 



I quote the above merely to emphasise one of 

 the peculiarities of the Western Hibernian flora, 

 showing as it does some historic connection 

 between this and other lands. 



From here we must leave the flora of 

 Connemara, as time did not permit me to 

 exhaust its other pleasures. 



Leaving Recess early in the morning and 

 motoring to Galway, from there by the coast 

 route of Clare we passed through a maze of 

 Alpine beauty. Just out oi' (ialway we en- 

 countered Gentiana growing on a hill projecting 

 out into the sea, but its importance here fades 

 into insignificance when seen in the Bally- 

 vaughan district. 



inspection. It is the predominating plant over 

 this area of mountain region, yet growing with 

 and about it are Geranium sanguineum and 

 Orchis mascula, which is one of the most beau- 

 tiful associations of plants that I have ever seen 

 in nature. There you have the dazzling bril- 

 liancy of the Geranium, the subdued purples ol' 

 the Orchis, and the Dryas carpeting below 

 them, which is a sight worthy of reproducing, 

 and, after all, to imitate is the severest form of 

 flattery ; and this is one of the instances where 

 Nature teaches us, for a plant growing in 

 nature is never wrongly placed. 



Below the rocky slopes on which the Dryas 

 is growing is Saxifraga Sternbergii, and here 



