SAXIFRAGA. 



and no less. Its English name is Saxifrage — a singularly apt, easy, 

 expressive, and beautiful one, in universal use except in Wardour 

 Street, where the appropriate Ruskinian faddists sometimes try to 

 talk of it in print (but never in words) as RockfoU — a dismal and 

 tedious affectation which all reasonable people unanimously ignore. 

 In general average of beauty the race is not so dazzling as those of 

 Primula and Gentiana, but in furnishing value, ease, robustness of 

 temper and stately charm of port and foliage alike, Saxifraga un- 

 doubtedly obliterates every other alpine race in the garden. A vast 

 proportion of the species are both spreading and easy ; nearly all can 

 be pulled to pieces and propagated at will, and all will come readily 

 from their fine seeds, which should be sown on the surface of a pot 

 filled with soil as fine as themselves, and not earthed over, but 

 with glass and paper atop to keep them close and dark. Their 

 flowering season begins with S. Burseriana magna, affronting the 

 rains of February, followed by nearly all the rest of the Kabschia 

 group and their hybrids, until with early summer the Mossies 

 and Euaeizoons break into a blaze of beauty. Summer is poorer 

 except in the golden stars of Hirculus, but autumn yields the fluffy 

 white clouds of 8. cortusaefolia and S. Fortunei. The family is of 

 universal range throughout the Northern hemisphere, ahke of the 

 Old and New World ; in many situations its members have developed 

 needs and characteristics so diverse that the race, for the sake of 

 convenience, is divided into seventeen very definite sections. It 

 might here be well done to arrange the species according to these 

 classes, yet, for the sake of reference, pitying in advance the seeker 

 after truth who vainly quests his Saxifrage from group to group, 

 it is more convenient to treat the sorts alphabetically, first giving 

 a synopsis of the sections, their needs and characters and claims ; 

 and then, wherever possible, assigning each plant (in its due order as 

 it comes) to the particular class to which it belongs. Thus I hope 

 the labour of memory will prove less than otherwise the work of 

 cross-reference would have proved arduous. There is not yet, of 

 course, any finality in the family, which lies at present in a fearful 

 welter of confusion, largely owing to its popularity in the garden, which 

 has impelled nurserymen to go on perpetually issuing unauthorised 

 and synonymous and false species, as well as multiplying varieties 

 with a zeal only to be paralleled by botanists themselves ; to say 

 nothing of the family's own perplexing and insatiable passion for 

 natural interbreeding, no less on the hills than in cultivation. The 

 result accordingly is an interminable string of entanglements, super- 

 fluities, repetitions, and confusions, all tending to the bewilderment 



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