122 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
But this, alas! is rather a miff, I don’t know why. Others 
may well be luckier than I; but here I have never really 
established either coerulea or serpyllifola, although I re- 
member how at Kirkstall they grew about under bushes, 
in dank ground, just like the commonest of cresses. 
Many Valerians are frequently advertised in flaming 
terms. I have now bought most of them, in hopes to 
find a pretty one; but I never have. I think they are 
invariably, big and little, rather coarse dowdy plants. 
Arizonica was warmly recommended ; celtica had a senti- 
mental interest ; rotundifolia was described as attractive. 
But they are every one of them disappointing, with a 
good deal of leaf and then dull flattish mounds of very 
poor pinky-purply flowers. No more Valerians for me, 
then, please! One species, dioica, I think, has little whitish 
flower-heads that cover all the wet places about here, 
and iniquitously annoy me when I go questing for white 
forms of Primula farinosa, perpetually luring me from 
afar with their general suggestion of an Albino Primula, 
and then when I have scrambled up or down the hill 
after them, mocking me with their nasty anzemic Valerian- 
faces. Almost every rare plant has a sort of protective 
Double, I find, who deludes one, and embitters one’s 
search. When I ransacked the Devil’s Kitchen above 
Llyn Idwal for Lloydia serotina, there were innumerable 
nameless little white things that kept putting me off and 
setting my heart in a flutter; in the high Alps one is 
perpetually shinning up cliffs after Kritrichium, only to 
discover Myosotis rupicola, or darting after a white 
Gentian, only to find some irritating Mountain Chrysan- 
themum or Camomile. 
As for Scabious and Teasle, they do not give us very 
much. When we get to them we are close under the 
shadow of Compositae, and the curse of coarseness that 
blights our largest race of flowering plants falls also on 
