SAXIFRAGA. 



b. primvloeidea is a much dwarf g version of the 



a incomparably the most delightful of all. This makes a n< at 



and charming little massed colony of copious growth, with mounded 



. k, down-! y -edged fat foliage, and com 



h loose showers of brilliant soft -pink stars on pinkish si cms in 

 rally summer — a beauty of the greatest willingness and charm, yot 

 never becoming too rampageous for its place, as is the way with the 

 others of the group, unfitted for anything but a wild and worthless 

 place. 



S. uirib. serratifolia, or 8. umb. acanthifolia, is merely an ordinary 

 London Pride, with especially coarse saw-edges to the leaves, which, 

 in shady places, tend to develop long leaf-stalks. 



8. iimb. variegata makes bright colours of pink and white and green, 

 ially in winter, but tends in all soils, even the poorest and sunniest 

 (but quite certainly and promptly in richness and shade) to revert to 

 type — a trait displeasing to all who love such freaks. 



S. valdensis is an extremely rare prize. There is hardly a catalogue 

 that does not offer it, or a nursery that possesses it. For the thing 

 which so many gardeners under this name cultivate and label and dis- 

 play, is nothing but S. cochlearis minor in its smallest huddled forms. 

 There is, however, some excuse for the error, at least as far as the tuft 

 is concerned. For the two species do mako something of the same effect 

 in the foliage at a first glance, though a second very soon shows that the 

 leaf -tip of the impostor is widened but flat, while in the true 8. valdensis 

 it is more or less puffed up and fat as well. To say nothing of the fact 

 that in all forms of 8. cochlearis the flowers are borne on almost glandless 

 and smooth fine stems in loose spires of 4 or 5 inches, whereas in S. val- 

 densis, which is not an Aeizoon but a Kabschia, they are clustered 

 up a denser-glandular stout stem, and collected in a fewer-flowered 

 closer truss. The true species is also extremely rare in nature, no less 

 than in the garden, only to be seen in one or two hot and sunny cliffs 

 of schists and disintegrating granites high in the Cottian Alps, thus 

 differing from all other Kabschias, not only in its alpine proclivities, 

 but also in its love of non -calcareous formations. No one who has 

 seen it can ever mistake it again. In the caso of the small forms of 

 S. cochlearis the tiny blue-grey leaves stand erect and apart, in a looser 

 be, in a looser clumped mass of rosettes. If you put your hand 

 ii you will feel a number of little points, yielding clastically to 

 tli" touch ; they never curl outwards in a tight mass, as do those of 

 in its native rocks, forms the tightest, hardest and 

 smoothest clones of the race, the leaves being narrower and rather 

 longer than in 8. cochlearis, of a darker grey-green, with a more definite 



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