SAXIFRAGA. 



conditions as suit 8. Fortune*, from which it may typically be distin- 

 guished by flowering about three weeks earlier — towards the end of 

 mber — with taller, looser Bhowers of more abundant, smaller, 

 and starrier white flowers, above the same nobly handsome waxy- 

 . dark-green foliage, ample and lobed. These are both quite 

 hardy but Bound diainage ensures the safety of the clumps : 



and shelter secures their blooms from damage. 



Boissier, Fl. Orient., lives on the damp rocks of 

 Gadmufl a* about 0000 feet, and is practically the same thing as 

 8. luteoviridis of Transylvania, with narrower, more pointed leaves and 

 sharper calyx-lobes. Its picture is that of small neat rosettes of 

 greyness in the fashion of 8. media, with loose heads of little yellow 

 flowers in large and very glandular fluffy green calyces, giving the 

 effect of a Cowslip gone mad. It should have a shady place, and there 

 grows with the utmost read in* 



8. corymb ... 1". and T., is a much smaller 8. diver sifolia, 



a high-alpine 8. Hirculus with the flower-pedicels glandular, indeed, 

 but not clothed in brown hairs. 



8. Cossoniana lias the largest and most magnificent blossoms of all 

 the Spaniards. It is a Xephrophyllum, living in the shady limestone 

 rocks of Valentia at alpine and sub-alpine levels, where it makes 

 close tufts of huddled, little rounded sticky leaves, heart -lobed where 

 they meet the petiole (which, like the lower part of the plant, is cob- 

 webbed with fine fluff). The flowers are borne on long foot-stalks in a 

 branching loose fountain of 8 or 10 inches. 



8. Cotyledon. — It is a complete mistake to describe the grandest of 

 all the big Plume-silvers as monocarpic. What does happen is that 

 the Jlowert nvwridbly dies, but the stock, if happy, has mean- 



while thrown out a dozen more, which carry on, undiminished, the 

 magnificent traditions of last E i prepare their own successors 



by the spring, against the summer when they shall all themselves 

 have flowered and died. The mass, in fact, is immortal ; it is only the 

 bloom-spires that die. So that this noble species, with nothing more 

 to show than its mats of twenty or thirty rosettes of noble strap-shaped 

 leathern bead-edged leaves in noble rosettes of 6 inches across and 

 more, is in itself the glory of the rock-work, alike by winter and 

 summer, without <: proticipating " on the wonder of its waving yard- 

 high plumes of delicate snow-white, sometimes pink-freckled and some- 

 times pure, but often as many as twenty at a time, mopping and 

 mowing with their inimitable ample grace from some high slope, 

 tly as they wave over masses more than a yi cd across, from all 

 the black granites of the Simplon and its southward valley.-, even by 



264 



