120 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
gold flower-heads. Eryngiwm glaciale, in defiance of its 
name, is a Spaniard, and, I believe, very seldom seen. 
It was given to me by a kind gardener near Carn- 
forth, where it throve in rather a casual place on the 
rock-work, and gave fertile seed. I, misled by its minute 
appearance and glacial name, planted it reverently in the 
moraine. However, it did not take this misguided atten- 
tion amiss, for it unfolded its little tufts as complacently 
as ever—until ultimately, alas! a slug made, in one night, 
an utter end of Eryngium and all my joy together. 
The true Eryngium alpinum and its form superbum are 
really the very best of the ordinary Sea-Hollies—rare 
plants rather, in the Alps, though I have once seen the 
type above St. Martin Vesubie. Its huge frilly blue 
collar and solid blue flower-head, topping the broidered 
blue and silver foliage, give it a Byzantine beauty; other 
good kinds, though not better, are Bourgati, planifolium, 
and Olivieri. As for the Pandanus-leaved section— 
pandanifolium and Serra and so forth, no persuasion can 
make me think them anything but ugly,—with their 
enormous yucca-like leaves, and their mean little tiny 
dull flower-heads on stout promising stems. However, as 
‘Formes architecturales’ for bold landscape gardening 
these plants no doubt have a value. Only not in 
the rock-garden. As for the pretty little Bupleurums, 
with their umbels of golden buttercup-like blossoms, I 
have never been able either to collect them successfully 
hitherto or to raise them from seed. And, with them 
expires, I think, the possibilities of the Umbrella-bearers. 
The small scattered orders that intervene between the 
great horticultural Sahara of Umbelliferae, and the greater 
horticultural Sahara of Compositae, give us a good many 
valuable things. In the first place, Araliaceae gives us 
(beside the minute and fascinating miniature ivy, Hedera 
minima) the magnificent ‘ Udo, Aralia cordata, a common 
