RANUNCULUS. 



of the first stumbling trickles that are in time to be the Rhine, the 

 Rhone., the Inn ; or by the shores of the glacial lakes, sheeting the 

 stony levels in a shroud of pink and white. It is especially abundant 

 in the main chains, the highest climber of our phanerogams, ascending 

 to 14.000 feet on the Finsteraarhom. It wanders eastwards., and 

 abounds throughout the Lombard Alps, Tyrol. Styria. Salzburg and 

 Carinthia, never on the limestone, and never at all descending from 

 the highest places. It then ceases, but for one last outbreak in 

 Transylvania far away, and one isolated mountain of Bavaria where 

 it is extremely rare. To the West it roams more feebly, is a rarity 

 in the Pyrenees, and rarer still in the Siena Nevada. No one who 

 has ever trodden the high places of the non-calcareous Alps has failed 

 to rejoice over the world-hiding profusion of those fleshy-fat grey- 

 green tufts, with their branching stems crouched under enormous 

 full-faced flowers of dazzling whiteness that after fertilisation pass 

 into a deeper and deeper rose colour till they fade into stale blood. 

 But the species greatly varies ; the levels of the Lac Savine abova 

 the Mont Cenis are solidly pink with it over the distances, making an 

 effect like daisies on a vicarage lawn, but as the comparison suggests, 

 the form here is poor, starveling, and one-flowered, as compared to 

 the sturdy jungles of it on the Monzoni Thai, covered with snowy 

 flowers the size of five-shilling pieces, or the less upstanding but no 

 less comely-saucered type of the upmost screes in the Engadine and 

 Oberland. The gardener should choose his forms with care, and with 

 no less care get them up. For the fat roots, bunchy and countless. 

 wander far down and wide ; ice-axes are the fittest implements of 

 collection. And then it should be cultivated in heavy stony loams 

 kept constantly flushed with water below in summer : thus R. gtociali< 

 may be led to thrive almost as heartily as by the shores of the 

 snow-lakes up towards the stars and the great silences of its home. 

 Clark's elaborate recommendations about making a 6-inch-deep (!) 

 pocket for it, are a pathetic reminder of the dear dead days when you 

 built your rock-garden of any garbage, and then had to spend the 

 rest of your life and money in pecking little unsatisfactory " pockets " 

 in it for anything special you wished to grow; so that the poor dying 

 alpines there earned a reputation for difficulty that was the last thing 

 they wanted. Now that the garden is well-built from the base, and 

 in toto. the Ranunculus offers less of a problem, so long as the under- 

 ground water-supply be constant and abundant, the soil solid and rich. 

 but perfectly drained, with abundance of large, sharp stones as well as 

 chips, for the plant's stout roots to take hold of and luxuriate beneath. 

 It is, perhaps, of all the granitic group of high-alpines. the most blatant 



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