SAPONARIA. 



bricon, beneath the frown of the Cimon della Pala in the Southern 

 Dolomites, where, sandwiched between vast slabs of weather-riven 

 granite, its huge tap-root spreads inwards, and over the rock flows 

 flat and hard the brilliant lucent pale-green mat of foliage, in point 

 of fact never to be confused with Silcne acaulis, on account of the 

 broader, longer, blunter, glossier, paler, ampler foliage of wholly 

 different and much more sumptuous effect. Or sometimes it may be 

 four.'i up. growing in open bare peat}- earth-pans of the 



mountain (but never at its happiest in the turf, if at all), there forming 



I lucent domes a footballs sitting about upon the black 



Into which they drive roots like fal •■£ a yard 



and more. The flowers come forth in summer from baggy reddish 



sticky calyces., on hardly any stem at all — wide flimsy single Godetias 



B _ i carnations of soft rosy pink. After which the capsule 



matu :he withered undecaying bag of the calyx ; and in time 



the little stem, such as there is of one, fades quietly away, so that in 



the spring you find the sere bags, with their unscattered seed-pods 



inside, lying in such neat piles round the parent plants that it looks 



as if they must have been nipped off and hoarded there in heaps by 



squirrel or mountain -marmot. In cultivation S. pumilio is 



not easy ; it is not hard to collect, with care ; it bears removal well, 



and re-establishes with beautiful promptitude in sand. But nearly 



all other conditions seem distasteful to it. when the time comes for its 



translation into the garden — where it certainly does best in perfectly- 



drained slopes in the fullest sun, in a rich compost, mix.d with 



stones, of about a third part of mingled leaf-mould, peat and sand, 



deep — at least 3 feet — with a very coarse bed of drainage -blocks 



below (whether water be to flow far down or not), and nowhere, as it 



is, the slightest 'perceptible trace of lime, which has the same 

 effect on the Saponaria as the parched pea in the Princess's bed ; no 

 matter how deep and pure the plant's soil, if lime to the size of a pea- 

 pod be th i ..rable by its haughty sensibility, it will at once 

 make haste towards a better world, accepting no apologies. In culti- 

 vation, if happy, it seems to flower profusely, but on the Alps a strange 

 irregularity it. I have heard, in the Hohe Tauern, of high 

 moors that blush with its blossom ; on Colbricon, where 8. pumilio 

 is certainly abundant and in fine form, I have collected abundant 

 in early spring left from the foregoing season ; but another year, 

 being up there in July, my closest scrutiny could nowhere detect the 

 remotest promise of a bud, on cushions no matter how solid ond 



thy, that i i - -hat time to have been showing swellings 



preparatory to flower in August. At home 8. pumilio flowers in later 



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