128 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
build. However it is an easy doer, and a favourite with 
many people, though it no longer finds a place on my 
rock-gardens. Amphiocarpus Neumeyeri is a strange hardy 
plant—and where I got it I do not know. Its attraction 
is the tuft of oval-pointed silver leaves ; the small flowers, 
when they come, are rather dowdy. The Antennarias 
are best represented by our own precious little native, 
Antennaria dioica—a creeping weed, but very valuable for 
a waste bank, with small hoary leaves and chaffy little 
heads of white or rose-pink like a wee everlasting. 
Of the Thistles, what gardener wants to be reminded ? 
‘Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem. I once, re- 
gardless of wisdom and warnings, had Carduus eriophorus, 
from seed collected on cliffs near Scarborough; but this 
giant of his race died out after flowering, and I have 
never replaced him, fearful lest a worse thing befall me. 
For, of the two alternatives, reproduction or extinction, 
the gardener will certainly be thankful for extinction 
where most of the Thistles are concerned. The one excep- 
tion is Onopordon bracteatum, who sins in the opposite 
direction. For Onopordon bracteatum—so beautiful that 
there is no need ever again to think of any other Ono- 
pordon, makes huge rosettes of crinkled spiny leaves, 
brilliant silver grey, with veins of pure silver. And when 
the vast candelabra of rather inferior purple flowers has 
been sent up and matured, the whole thing dies, and 
there are you, planté la, with the Onopordon to raise again 
from the very beginning from seed. However, for high, 
bold places on the rock-work, Onopordon is eminently 
worth the trouble; and his seed has, at least, the virtue 
of germinating freely. 
Carduncellus is a wee thing, like a small blue-purple 
Thistle, quite close to the ground, who is attractive in 
any barren place ; while Carlina acaulis is a very beautiful 
Alpine, which you will see in August and September, all 
