PHYTEUMA. 



the effort, and far more worthily repays it. Ph. comosum is so 

 utterly unlike the rest that it has now been put by Dalla Torre into 

 a race apart : however, for the moment we may stick to the old name. 

 In the hardest and sheerest limestones of the far Southern and Eastern 

 ranges it chooses the most adamantine precipices for its home, and 

 there alights in only the most microscopic crannies of an apparently 

 unbroken cliff-face. Here its root stock, yellow and fat, flows out 

 and in and far until it has precisely moulded the cranny as if old 

 wax had been poured in and hardened. From this, on fine stems, 

 spring a number of leaves not unlike the evanescent basal leaves of 

 the Harebell, but quite thick and fat, and of a green so dark and 

 metallic in tone that it looks like cast-iron, so that no one who has 

 ever seen Phyteuma comosum will ever mistake it again, in flower 

 or out of flower, for anything else — although, curiously enough, as 

 all precious plants seem to have their jackals, so the Phyteuma is 

 roughly mimicked hi the colouring and sombre gloss of its foliage by 

 Veronica Bona-Eotu, which inhabits the same walls and from afar 

 often gives false hopes of the other, alluring one in haste up the 

 stony scree to the base of the cliff, there at once to be disillusioned 

 by the wholly different shoots and leaf -shape of that delusive and 

 snobbish Veronica. So then, in the summer, up from amid the waving 

 tuft of leaves, deriding all trowels from their crevice, arise several 

 stout stems of 3 or 4 inches, set with dark, oval-pointed foliage, deeply 

 and coarsely-toothed, and ending in a head of flowers more eccentric 

 than need of insect ever designed before. Sitting, as it seems, among 

 the scalloped leaves of sombre greenish- black, unfold the clusters of 

 immense diaphanous yet solid flowers like bunched soda-water bottles 

 of pale purple deepening to their tip, from which the curly stigma goes 

 frisking forth in manner weird and wild. It is indeed the strangest of 

 all children of the cliffs, and, I may also say, the hardest to dislodge. 

 This being so, I may safely instance the stark iron walls behind the 

 Hotel Faloria at Cortina, as a place where it may be observed in notable 

 abundance and fine charaoter ; but all over that region it occurs in the 

 high limestone crags, and there only, and only there if the hardness of 

 the rock exactly suits its view. There is an ancient tuft, the great- 

 grandfather of tufts, in an impregnable cliff by the bridge going down 

 to Storo in the Val di Ledro, that yearly greets the pilgrim of Daphne 

 petraea with increasing flaunts of its magnificence, until it has 

 grown an old friend, always to be looked for and waved to in passing ; 

 while high, high above this gorge, in the rocks of the Daphne itself, 

 the Phyteuina grimly clings, and finds that even Daphne petraea is 

 too loose in its notions, and but few of its precipices quite hard enough 



71 



