SAXIFRAGA. 



much greener colouring, with delicate glandular hairs to be seen with 

 a lens all round their margins. The stems are finely glandular too, 

 about 3 inches high, or less, carrying several flowers of dazzling white- 

 ness, and even larger than those of S. diapensioeides, above a cushion 

 so much smaller that they seem enormous. It is a species of the 

 most venerable rarity, only to be gaped at from below, here and 

 there on some of the starkest precipices of South Tyrol. It takes 

 its name from the Cima Tombea, where it shared those blazing cliffs 

 with Daphne petraea, until exterminated by a German vandal. 

 The extermination, however, is not complete. Here and there it may 

 still be, seen on the Tombea, occasionally in a low and open place ; and 

 on one outstanding bluff the reverent may take joy in the sight of three 

 splendid tufts of the Saxifrage freely growing and seeding on a cliff where 

 no German or any other Hun will care to tread. And there are a few 

 other stations for S. tombeanensis, but not many : here and there along 

 the line of Baldo,and elsewhere in that immediate region round the head 

 of Garda. But nowhere else is it to be found in the world, and even 

 there is a plant that has a sad .propensity to die off brown in patches 

 of the tuft, though it does all in its power to secure health by seeking, 

 as it seems, only the hottest and sunniest aspects of the limestone cliffs, 

 exactly after the habit of 8. Vandellii, but not at all in the taste of 

 8. diapensioeides. In the garden it grows happily in sunny places in 

 light and limy loam, but its tiny crusted grey-green shoots are so minute 

 and glandular in their tumbled hard masses that they seem mysteriously 

 to invite the invasion of moss, which, if it comes, has to be picked out 

 laboriously with pins, as otherwise it overlays and extinguishes the 

 Saxifrage. If dissatisfied the dome will die off in parts, as it does at 

 home ; nor is it in cultivation always as profuse of blossom as S. dia- 

 pensioeides. It is so concisely small, and so extremely deliberate in 

 spreading, that it should have the very choicest of spots, immediately 

 before the worshipping eyes of all beholders who know what they see. 



S. tosaensis blooms in later summer, with white flowers on stems of 

 8 inches or so. It should have a sheltered and warm place in moist 

 soil, for it comes from the province of Tosa in South Japan, and may 

 not prove soundly hardy. It belongs to the large-leaved section of 

 S. tellimoeides, approaching to Boykinia. 



8. tricuspidata lives far away in the Arctic North. It is a most 

 distinct Trachyphyllum, to be confused with no other species. It 

 makes a spreading massing clump like the others, but the stiff and dark- 

 green foliage is wedge-shapod and cut at the top into three toothed lobes, 

 each with a bristlish point — bristles sometimes appearing also in a fringe 

 down the edge of the leaves. The flower-stems carry a few creamy 



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