RANUNCULUS. 



after which, they soon die down again, and leave the foliage once more 

 master of the field. 



R. Pallasii has a creeping stock, and all its leaves are stalked, 

 oval wedge-shaped, and more or less tri-cleft. The flowers are large, 

 with eight or nine potals and only three sepals. (Arctic Asia and 

 America.) 



R. par nass if otitis is always a rare and local treasure, occurring in high 

 silty beds of the limestone Alps from the Pyrenees to the Reiting in 

 Styria, but always a find to be thankful for, and nowhere a common- 

 place to expect. It has a most distinct and sombre beauty of its own 

 with its single (as a rule) tuft of stalked, oval-pointed, fat leaves, 

 thick and dark, of glossy solemn green, with deep lines of care engraved 

 upon their face, outlined with woolliness, and with a special fringe at 

 their crimsoned edge ; the fleshy and hairy stems bend lowly to the 

 earth beneath their branching burden of three or four most glorious 

 pearly moons of white blossom, sometimes tinted with pink on the 

 reverse, and built of very broad, overlapping petals, round and notchless. 

 It is to be seen especially in damp places of the finest silt, often rooting 

 into white wet clay as heavy as hate, with the long, fat roots that 

 emerge from its bulb-like frog-bit root that always seems to have rotted 

 away on the under side. In the garden it is the heartiest thriver, I 

 think, of all the hearty alpine section, in any fair and congruous 

 treatment, with free water allowed. It will even go the length of 

 seeding itself in the most improbable dry banks, and there continuing 

 to prosper as successfully as in the chosen and fussful places especially 

 prepared for it. But great care must be taken in buying a specimen. 

 The best forms, as I have said, are glorious, and never vary in their 

 beauty. But the type has a wide range of variation in the hills, and 

 should be collected from stations where its ways are beyond suspicion. 

 On the Piz Padella, for instance, where it abounds on the saddle, it 

 tends more than elsewhere to form up into close, large patches rather 

 leafier and laxer and smaller and duller in the foliage than elsewhere. 

 And here the abundant blooms never have any petals at all, but 

 only a few little twisted chaffy green tabs. This form, introduced 

 to cultivation, and often sent out by innocent nurserymen, has brought 

 much discredit on the grandest of the alpine white Buttercups, as you 

 may see it in the white clay of the Forcolla Lungieres, sumptuous and 

 pure. But on the highest rippled ridges of the Monzoni Thai, where 

 it has the isolated habit and the sober gloss of foliage of the last, 

 the flowers are still not successful in avoiding the bad example of 

 Padella. For, though they do their best, they never seem able to 

 achieve even the five perfect petals that are the fashion of the race, 



215 



