A COLLECTING DAY ABOVE AROLLA ‘79 
Collon, becoming the reigning tree as you get higher. 
‘Though in the past it has suffered fearfully from the 
prodigal destructiveness of the peasants, movements are 
now on foot to establish plantations of Pinus Cembra in 
favoured places (at Bel-Alp, I fancy, among others), so 
that its approaching extinction may perhaps be retarded 
indefinitely. For the forester and landscape gardener 
Pinus Cembra has no value; for the rock-garden, on the 
other hand, its slow growth and its dense habit give it 
very high merit. Asa wind-break it acts admirably, 
and, for general use, ranks only second to the genuinely, 
permanently dwarf Pinus montana. 
Even at Arolla itself you do not escape entirely from 
the forests, which still linger above you to the right. 
But the way becomes more open as you advance, skirting 
shaggy slopes of long grass and summer flowers. Not 
here, though, can Campanula barbata be seen in such 
unexampled splendour as in the meadows above Meiden. 
There its Campaniles seem taller, its great, fringy bells 
larger, more numerous, more shaggy, more blue than 
anywhere else in the Alps. I have already praised this 
plant ; now, deliberately, I must say that my praise was 
altogether insufficient for its merits. Campanula barbata 
is one of the most perfectly lovable plants that lives. 
No other epithet is so apt. Other things are more flam- 
boyant, other things are more startling in their colours, 
but very few plants in the garden have the gay pleasant- 
ness of Campanula barbata, the serene, large-hearted 
charm. Last sight I had of it, I remember, was abloom 
with all its usual generosity in the depths of London, on 
a rock in the Physic-Garden at Chelsea. 
But if the way to Arolla is not famous for Campanula 
barbata, in revenge, the sunniest, driest slopes are ablaze 
with the coralline loveliness of evil-tempered Dianthus 
sylvestris, most ungrateful of plants. But, indeed, the 
