RHODOTHAMNUS CHAMAECISTUS. 



reverse of the leathery little dark-green oval leaf, with fluffy flowers 

 of lovely pink in wands of colour all the way up, instead of merely in 

 heads at the top ; and there arc more and more beyond hope of number- 

 ing. But I find no place here for the Alpenrosen, in whose glowing 

 clusters there is mingled a tone of chalk, or something that usually 

 makes their colour seem squalling and mysteriously vulgar ; though 

 the albinoes are good, and the Alps will yield the eye of love a number 

 of exquisite pale flesh-coloured forms a great deal more easily than 

 these will then proceed to yield themselves to the trowel. 



Rhodothamnus Chamaecistus, on the contrary, is incom- 

 parably more beautiful than any of these, a native only of the Eastern 

 and Southerly Alps, and there only on the limestones, where, in cliff 

 or scree, it makes vast tussocks of shoots, clothed in tiny oval-pointed, 

 fringed leaves of bright green, emitting from the ends of each shoot in 

 summer a pair or so of the most exquisite saucer-wide flowers of pale 

 pure pink, each dancing bravely before the world on a fine and dainty 

 stem of its own. So delicately lovely a fairy can no longer, indeed, 

 be counted among the crude and clownish Alpenrosen to whose 

 family it was formerly assigned. In cultivation Rhodothamnus is 

 easy, once it has recovered the pain of transportation. But this takes 

 time ; the stocks and subterranean trunks are long and woody, the 

 fibres far and few and very fine, drying up in a moment unless the 

 greatest care is taken, and then never seeming able to recover vitality. 

 It is as well never to touch Rhodothamnus unless you find some slab 

 of a ridge that can be levered off to deliver you a perfect clump ; 

 or unless you at last find a little cave or canon of damp clayey silt 

 where the plant has seeded and grown into compact mats. If such 

 as these are got, and got down to the post without drying, and got home 

 to England without either drying or mouldering, the clumps will offer 

 no further difficulties, but, after a year of recuperation in the sand-bed, 

 may hopefully be put out on the rock-work in some not too fiercely 

 sunny place, with water flowing far underground if possible, in quite 

 perfectly-drained and spongy mixture of peat, leaf-mould, and rough 

 sand, leavened and lightened with innumerable chips of limestone, with 

 larger blocks, as the plant develops, hammered firmly down to act as 

 comfortable conductors to its trunks and wandering fibres. It is 

 the joy and glory of the Dolomites, and all the South-eastern lime- 

 stones — not coming westward at all of Garda, but lovely indoed along 

 the crests of Baldo, where it makes no such rampageous jungles of 

 display as the coarse flaring Alpenrosen, but offers cushions of un- 

 surpassable charm, danced over by these delicately staring pearl-pink 

 fairies of blossom. 



