SAPONARIA. 



S. ocymoeides belongs to warm places and open rough banks all 

 South Europe over, but attains its zenith of rosy glory in the 

 Alps, where whole barren mountain -sides in the Engadine are seen to 

 be crimson with it from afar ; while it fills the scant woods below the 

 Brenner with sheets of colour, and blots the banks and rocks and 

 railway-cuttings of the Pass with hassocks of pink. In the garden it is 

 a noted treasure for hanging about over rocks in light soil and full sun ; 

 it has no alpine look indeed, and suggests the bedding annual, but is 

 in point of fact perennial to the point of being immortal, and flops 

 each year further and further, the prostrate boughs beset with loose 

 heads and showers and sprays of rosy stars. There is a white form, 

 too, and various improvements offered by catalogues, of which the 

 one called S. o. splendidissima claims highest rank ; but every traveller 

 should take note of the type for himself as he goes, for it varies very 

 widely ; in districts where it is straggling and poor there is no turning 

 the trowel that way at all, but in its favoured hills there may quite 

 often be found forms of especial brilliancy and fullness of face. In 

 nature, as in the garden, it seems to have no rigid preference about 

 soils ; but certainly, so far as my own experience goes, I have usually 

 seen it far more abundant and generous of growth and flower on the 

 granitic than on the calcareous ranges (as in the instances given — the 

 Engadine and the Brenner). 



S. officinalis. — The common Soapwort, tall and ample, and no 

 bad anticipation in early summer of a paniculate Phlox, will go into 

 the wild garden. There are better forms and double forms ; and below 

 Botzen here and there from the train the traveller to Verona may 

 espy lovely shades of salmon-rose well worth breaking the journey to 

 collect. 



8. pampliylica in the rocks of its native Alps makes mats of foliage, 

 and sends up great numbers of flower-stems half a foot or a foot high. 



S. x peregrina is a hybrid between S. bellidifolia and 8. ocymoeides. 



S. x pulchella is a most attractive neat and bright hybrid between 

 8. ocymoeides and 8. pulvinaris. 



S. pulvinaris (S. pumilio, Boiss.) lives in the Alps of Anatolia, on 

 Lebanon, &c, making tight mats of minute narrow leaves, rather 

 blunt and keeled, and densely huddled, in effect like cushions of 

 Silene acaulis, from which are sent up short stems that carry one pink 

 flower as a rule, but sometimes as many as five or seven. 



[S. pumila=S. pumilio.'] 



8. pumilio is Silene pumilio of old years, and it is possible that the 

 last species is merely the child of confusion. For the same picture 

 paints 8. pumilio as it may be seen in the high granitic alps of Col- 



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