76 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
soil must be cleared away before the Great Light can 
penetrate its husk and ripen it to germination. 
Over the sun-trodden slopes of grass the mule-track 
mounts to Arolla. The scant, browned herbage wavers in 
the heat. Little lizards pant in ecstasy on the burning 
stones of the low wall that skirts the cobbled ascent. A 
hot fragrance of life and flowers throbs round one as one 
goes, and from each burning surface of rock rise on stiff, 
sticky stalks the rosy star-clusters of Sempervivum arach- 
noideum. Rosy I call them, and rosy they are in our pale 
air, but there, in that blaze, they are fire-red, glowing, 
incandescent. And their mats of round rosettes, too, are 
silver white with dense tomentum. In England we can 
rarely hope to see the bloom as brilliant, the little balls 
as snowy with down. The heat it is that achieves both 
miracles of beauty, and my climate, to speak for myself 
alone, has no friendly torridness for the Houseleeks. 
They live—oh yes, they live—and even thrive in a pallid 
way, but never do they attain the solid silver, the intense 
glow, that transfigured them on a sun-baked slope 
of Switzerland. My wet winters martyrise them, my 
uncertain summers perplex and bore them. On one rock, 
indeed, in the Old Garden, I had once tectorum, arach- 
noideum, and Laggeri thriving excellently. Then my 
manager and I read Clarke’s book on Alpines, put our 
heads together in a pious and humble spirit, and, as the 
author warmly enjoined, planted all our Sempervivums 
anew in a mixture of clay and cow-manure. With the 
result that they unanimously languished and expired. 
All the Sempervivums, in fact—and they are legion ; I 
might consume pages in analysing and noting the minute 
differences that make up the two hundred species or more 
that are cultivated—are sun-worshippers of the purest 
Zoroastrian zeal. Of them all, arvachnoideum, with its 
lovely variety transalpinum, is my favourite. Tectorum, 
