96 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
much unfits them for certain tastes. Lagascac, though, 
is a precious little plant from the Pyrenees, with bright, 
pure pink flowers with a white eye, a true rock-plant, 
rather inclined to be petulant and miffy in temper, 
demanding a well-drained fissure, from which, if happy, it 
sprouts like a bush, bearing abundance of blossom till 
quite late in the season. Pyrenaica is near it, but white, 
or pale pink. This I have grown, but lost some years 
ago, and have never replaced. 
Lychnis alpina and Lychnis lapponica are so close to 
each other as not to be easily distinguishable from a 
gardener’s point of view—both small tufty plants with 
tight, short-stemmed heads of magenta crimson or lilac 
flowers, varying to white. Alpina is a rare native, found 
on Hobcartin Fell in Cumberland, and both species are 
Northerners of the easiest cultivation, but not, to me, of 
any great charm, owing to the impurity of their colour. 
Lychnis Viscaria, with its double and splendens varieties, 
resembles a magnified alpina in every way, and labours 
(with the new Sartori) under exactly the same disabilities 
and advantages. <As for the double white form of our 
common native vespertina, it is rare, easy, and decidedly 
pretty in its way. Of the Saponarias, ocymoeides splen- 
didissima is indeed a splendid, good-natured trailer, to fall 
over a sunny rock in a dazzling sheet of rosy blossom, 
The rarer species, Saponaria wiemanniana, is a novelty 
which Iam trying, which is reported to make free-flower- 
ing tufts of pink. Caespitosa is a good thing, making 
larger tufts of paler blossom. JLwutea is a curious and 
very attractive Saponaria—low-growing, with short- 
stemmed heads of pale saffron flowers. She dwells in 
the Piedmontese Alps and blooms in July or August, 
very delightfully, with blackish stamens to enhance her 
flowers. Her constitution is not, I believe, absolutely 
trustworthy, but I have never had much difficulty with 
