BETWEEN DIANTHUS AND EPILOBIUM 107 
featherings of deep purple that give it the daintiest, slyest 
expression. Cheilanthifolium is lovely, with leaves like 
a fern, and dark pencillings on its pure white petals. 
Sibthorbianum is silver grey, and rose-colour; swpra- 
canum, Queen of Queens, has hoary whitened leaves, and 
flowers of clear pink. All these are so delightful that 
there is no rivalry. One must have them, every one of 
them, without exception. The only Erodium to be care- 
ful about is Manescavi, a stalwart, great coarse thing 
which will grow anywhere, with large handsome flowers 
of an even more truculent magenta-crimson than those 
of Geranium sanguineum. Personally I like the others so 
very, very much, in their self-conscious, sweet refinement, 
elfin and ethereal as Mélisande, that Iam all the more 
set against the rank gaudiness of this herbaceous weed. 
The Wood-sorrels, in a race of awful little pretty 
pests, have the privilege of giving us one of the very best 
of all alpine plants—a species so serenely beautiful and 
so easy to grow, that it counts certainly among the first 
six plants to be mentioned for the rock-garden. (Alas 
for the others! I have come on three candidates in as 
many pages.) Ovwalis enneaphylla hails from the Falk- 
land Isles, and makes himself tight little scaled bulbs 
like a miniature Lilium Auratum, which sit safe and quiet 
underground all the winter. With spring appear the 
glaucous grey leaves, each like a crinkled cluster of leaf- 
lets, on stems about four inches high; then, nestling 
among them, goodly white convolvulus-flowers, of a deli- 
cious brilliant colour, softened to a pearly richness by the 
very faintest suggestion of flesh-pink. I don’t know any 
more wholly worshipful Alpine than Owalis enneaphylla, 
and (whether or no our cool climate has anything to say 
to it), its hardy thriftiness is quite equal to its beauty. 
I stuff it away anyhow in loam on some shady ledge, and 
leave it quite unattended. Even in the fiercest or the 
