MORE OF THE SMALLER BOG-PLANTS 251 
borne, of a gentle clear lavender in the type-form, with 
featherings and splashings of purple in the basal segments. 
In the variety bicolor, more advertised, though hardly 
more beautiful, all the lower part of the flower is of a 
dense, velvety, tyrian purple. But Viola pedata is a 
perennial grief to the gardener. Its invariable habit is to 
dwindle away. ‘Truth to tell, it is only a mimp—though 
the loveliest mimp imaginable. All you can do is to give 
it very perfect, sharp drainage, in some very choice elevated 
corner of the bog-garden, in very light, nutritious soil. 
Even then there is no great hope of permanence. Asa 
consolation in misfortune, I may mention that Viola 
pedata is one of the many plants that have undoubtedly 
a strange unaccountable intractability even in their own 
native country. In America, in the districts where it is 
commonest, where it grows by the thousand in open sandy 
places, gardeners who carefully transplant it to an exactly 
similar place in their own gardens not a hundred yards 
away find that it inevitably pines and dies in cultivation. 
For our bog-garden—for dank shady rocks in its 
neighbourhood, rather—most desirable and most dainty, 
is another Viola of very different temper, the little twin- 
flowered, golden-yellow Violet that you find luxuriating 
in damp, cool, stony places all Switzerland over, from the 
depths of the pine forest, to the stony barrens near the 
summit of the Gemmi. With shade of rock, rich, damp 
soil, you cannot go wrong with Viola biflora, the gem and 
pride of stony steps and hollows in the garden, though 
slugs and mice, I admit, annoy it as distractingly as its 
big cousin calcarata. 
For wetter places of the bog you may perhaps use, 
very cautiously, in out of the way corners, our natives, 
Viola palustris and the rare stagnina variety of the 
common Dog-Violet. Viola stagnina is a dwarf form of 
canina, with large, creamy white flowers, and occurs 
