182 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
their large Leopard’s Bane flowers of a clear, rather shrill 
yellow. But the flowers, though enormous, are weak in 
substance, undistinguished in appearance, and uninterest- 
ing in colour; I cannot greatly love them, though the 
memory of them has lured me so high upon the hills, 
and though they are robust, unexacting and persistent in 
any sort of cultivation, however brutal. Far better, a 
hundred times better, do I love the Arnica, growing, as it 
does, a thousand feet lower on the Alps, among the 
varieties and hybrids of the big ugly Gentians, purpurea 
and lutea. And Arnica, when once you have gratified its 
morbid passion for peat, is as easy to grow in the rock- 
work as any daisy, though slugs or mice have a tender- 
ness for its buds and shoots, Every year, on a copsy 
shoulder of my peat-bed, among the straggling boughs 
of Cistus laurifolius, come up my masses of Arnica, in 
greater and greater abundance, their sweet, acrid, hearten- 
ing fragrance, when bruised, blending delightfully with 
the haunting violet-fragrance of the Cistus. Not that 
my Arnicas are in shade; far from it; sun and exposure 
they require ; the Cistus merely throws frail tentacular 
branches here and there towards them. Arnica is, par 
excellence, the dear plant of promise; when, on the bare 
hillside, amid the brown herbage, you first begin to see 
its ragged great orange stars rising high above the ground- 
hugging rosette of broad, pale soft leaves, pleated and 
silky, then you realise that only a few score feet of 
arduous climbing still separate you from the high stony 
lands where Androsace and glacier-Buttercup run riot. 
Once, too, I found a couple of Arnicas that carried 
blossoms of a very pale sulphur-yellow ; but these, though 
I collected them and nursed them carefully, never did any 
good and, I think, have since passed away. It is here to 
be noted, by the way, that Arnica has immense voracious 
whipthong roots, which must be allowed ample pastur- 
