80 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
Pinks are a difficult race; I am reminded, by my memories 
of Arolla, that certain seedling Pinks, of which I held out 
great hopes in My Rock-Garden, as due to bloom that 
year in unheard-of loveliness, turned out, after all, to be 
dull, fringy dowdies of a most vapid and milky descrip- 
tion. These came to me under such high titles as 
cinnamomeus and pruinosus. Only cinnabarmus failed to 
bloom, and so, most likely, to disappoint. The postponed 
disappointment, I already fear, is no less certain than the 
bloom. 
And so, past copse and meadow, the track leads on 
and on, until at last we come to the Mont Collon Hotel 
itself, sitting lonely at Arolla (which is only a name) 
above a marsh full of Savifraga aeizoeides. And in front 
of this there is nothing but the gaunt, promising desola- 
tion of stone stretching up to the feet of the Mont 
Collon, whose vast bulk closes in the grim little valley. 
To the right rises another big humped mountain, the 
Pigne d’Arolla, carrying a few sparse old specimens of 
Pinus Cembra on its rust-coloured screes. But the hotel 
stands on the fringe of the last woodland, and the other 
slope of the glen is clothed rather with copse and tangle 
of Pinus montana than with any more notable tree. High 
and high above all this stretches, against the blue, the 
saw-line of the mountain-ridge, so fiercely planned as to 
be hardly patient of any snow. Midway stands up the 
Aiguille de la Zé, a stark pinnacle like some gigantic 
saurian’s tooth, no less waspish and deadly than its hiss- 
ing mosquito-cry of a name. Standing there before the 
hotel, as darkness gently cools the air of the mountains, 
a gardener alone will understand perhaps how the heart 
of a gardener bounds to think that he has escaped the 
fertile, unprofitable land of meadow and forest, that 
he has come at last to the territory of great open 
spaces, of that illimitable, gorgeous desolation, which 
