SAXIFRAGE 



It Lb a notably free flowerer, and seems to rejoice in the fullest 

 sunshine. 



S. x Fergusonii is a red-flowen I M me blood and use 



5 -Uiiifj— that is, emanating from the false " S. Rhei " 

 — a plain of real value and ease and brilliance. 



S.JUicavlis is a small Himalayan high-alpine with minutely toothed 

 foliage, narrowly oblong. The stems of 2 or 3 inches are all glandular- 

 hairy, and much branched, each spray carrying a single flower, white 

 or yellow. 



S. jimbriata stands almost undistinguishably near S. brachypoda, 

 but that the stems carry bulbils, and also two or three golden flowers 

 instead of only one. 



S. flagellaris belongs to the Trachyphyllum group, and is sadly 

 rare in cultivation, to which it does not seem always to take kindly. 

 It has wholly the habit of S. Brv.noaiana, but the leaves of the main 

 rosettes are much broader, oblong-obovate, more or less glandular- 

 hairy*, more or less stiffly fringed, and often with a final spinule or 

 bristle at their tip. They throw innumerable plant-buds on long red 

 arching threads, and the leafy flower-shoot of 2 or 3 inches is densely 

 hairy with glands, and carries either one bright golden blossom or 

 several in a truss. It seems that this should have a more artificially 

 alpine situation than is exacted by 8. Brunoniana, and go into the 

 gritty underground-watered moraine. 



S. florulenta can never be mistaken for anything else, whether in 

 rosette or in flower. It is a tragic and splendid old species, lingering 

 on, alone in the race, in the gaunt cold precipices of granite here and 

 there at great elevations in a limited district of the Maritime Alps, 

 from the Enchastraye in the West to the Rocca del Abisso over 

 the Col de Tenda in the East. There in the stark red-grey walls it 

 hangs, making a broad rosette of almost uncanny splendour, with 

 glassy-smooth leaves, quite narrow, and of perfect brilliant sombre 

 green without the least touch of beading or silver, stiff and hard 

 and sharply ciliated at their edges, running out into a point so acute 

 that a healthy tuft is as prickfy and ticklish to handle as holly or a 

 bough of gorse. It has some affinities to a large rosette of S. longifolia, 

 if this can be imagined spiny-pointed and of solemn emerald. But 

 whereas 8. longifolia always has its foliage splayed outwards and 

 backwards against the rock, so as to receive the gifts of heaven un- 

 impeded, 8. florulenta always remains incurved like an angry dark-green 

 sea-anemone, and never begins to unfurl its foliage until the moment 

 comes for it to flower and die. This often takes many years ; the 

 plant can live in unfavouring crannies to an enormous age, forming 



274 



