THE GREATER BOG-PLANTS 181 
not the free habit, and certainly not the rare startling 
beauty that distinguishes Senecio Doronicum. 
No; having climbed high in a moment on to the 
beloved Alps of my heart’s eternal longing, I will not come 
lumbering down again immediately to the levels of my 
bog-garden five or six thousand feet below in the stuffy, 
wooded valley. It is too far to go for only one tantalis- 
ing minute; now that I am here I will stay a while and 
drink deep breaths of the mountains, and wander round 
among the lesser cousins of the Groundsels. Every one 
knows the big leafy yellow Leopard’s Banes of every 
cottage garden, carrying abundant coarse Dandelion 
flowers in early spring, on tall stems of two or three feet. 
‘These one may grow in rough worthless corners, and both 
plantaginewm and pardalianches are so vigorous that they 
have established themselves as wildlings in several English 
woods. Orphanidesi I reared from seed, and had high 
hopes of, because only one seed ever germinated. How- 
ever that, in the changes and chances of the potting- 
shed, vanished mysteriously, and was no more seen. So 
I have little to say of Doronicum. But the high Alps 
give us some cousins of the Doronicums that are almost 
their twins. The Aronicums, of which glaciale and scor- 
proeides are to my eyes barely distinguishable, only come 
into view when you are leaving even Senecio Doronicum 
behind, and are well up on the desolate territory of the 
moraines. Here the broad, ephemeral leaves of the 
Aronicums begin to peer at you from stony slopes and 
the shadow of dank wet rocks. ‘They look far too flop- 
ping, thin-textured and brilliant in their shallow green to 
be growing here in this desolation, amid these rigorous 
stern conditions, hardly a hundred feet from Eritrichium 
nanum, and within bowing distance of the glacial Ranun- 
culus. Yet here these plebeian-looking creatures flourish, 
and here they send up occasionally, on short leafy stems, 
