12 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
from the Dolomites. Hacquetti is as easy-tempered in 
good soil anywhere on the rock-work as a weed, and 
resembles a minute spreading arguta not three inches 
high, with heads and garlands of little snow-white flowers. 
It is a neat, tidy little grower, which all who possess it 
should set to work propagating from cuttings, the beauty 
and value of it being pre-eminent. I prefer it, so far, to 
all I have yet seen of the newer, tinier Spiraea caespitosa, 
which is nearly as dwarf as a moss and, I think, less 
inspiring. 
As for the Reine des Pres, Spiraca Aruncus, this great 
herbaceous species is usually grown as a border plant, in 
dense clumps. Grown thus, in huge masses, though it is 
glorious in flowering time with its sheaves and plumes of 
creamy bloom, it gives you no idea of its wonderful 
beauty when occurring on some barren wet rock in one 
single crown, carrying three, perhaps, of its graceful arch- 
ing leaves, and one feather of flower on a four-foot stem. 
It was thus that I first saw it years ago in the awful 
gloom of the Georges de ‘Trient, with three hundred sheer 
feet of damp cliff on either hand, interlapping as they 
mounted, to intercept the few faint ghostly rays of day- 
light that filtered down into that gleaming den of dark- 
ness. ‘The air was eternally cold with twilight and the 
spume of a roaring torrent, but, wherever plant could find 
lodgment in the crannies, there Spiraea Aruncus had 
sown itself, and its isolated spires of whiteness wavered 
like phantoms in the chill gloaming. So, in my garden, 
Aruncus, from two huge clumps in the borders above, has 
sown itself here and there in tiny crevices that admit no 
increase in the size or number of its crowns, and thus, in 
single spikes, the plant has a rare grace and charm. I 
am trying, too, following this delightful hint, to make it 
germinate over the sixty feet or so of creviced limestone 
precipice that overhangs the lake at Ingleborough where 
