258 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
pungent protests of bruised mint, filling the air for yards 
with its fierce fragrance. Mentha Requienit hails from 
Corsica, and so might well be rather tender. However, 
after the hardest winter you are pretty sure, next 
summer, to come on new patches and tracts of the little 
Mint, smallest of its kind—smallest flowering plant in 
cultivation. The last is a Novelty,—always to be men- 
tioned with an MHonorific capital, though it isn’t a 
bog-plant, and though I don’t know its provenance, nor 
the explanation of its jaw-breaking name. AHelainé 
Soleiroli has only just come into cultivation, and bids fair 
(Nertera, the fruiting Duckweed, so like a scarlet-berried 
Lemna, being half-hardy, as also is Mitchella) to be the 
most important carpeter in the garden, almost beating 
Arenaria balearica out of the field. Helxiné grows 
as quick as a dream or a fungus—developing into a dense 
sheet of verdure like a wee Ficus, with round leaves in 
pairs. It grows with equal frenzy in good soil or none 
at all, on bare rock or rich slope, in blazing sun or dense 
shade. In summer it breaks out into blossom—into a 
profusion of microscopic flowers that give the whole 
plant the effect of being powdered with gold dust. As a 
final recommendation, every shoot and fragment of the 
plant will strike root and grow, no matter how small, no 
matter where, nor how recklessly, inserted. Perhaps it is 
not everywhere, nor invariably, to be trusted in winter, 
but in all except very unfavourable corners I believe it 
perfectly safe; and anyhow, one reserved pot will give 
you a myriad new plants for next season. 
