SILENT 



and weedy species of which an enormous number are annuals into the 

 bargain. The race is predominantly Southern, and is often being 

 split and re-divided; the following list includes Heliosperma, and, 

 besides omitting all worthless annuals and all the ranker tall-growing 

 herbaceous species, will try to warn the buyer against less worthy 

 perennials in a of low general average attractiveness, yet too 



often having its many species advertised in lists without comment. 



S. acavlis is perhaps the best known and the most generally praised 

 of all alpine plants. I can never feel that the praise is deserved, nor 

 that the species really merits quite such sedulous attention in the 

 garden, where so many things of far higher merit could be cultivated 

 with a tithe of the labour bestowed to suit this cushion of rather crude 

 little chalk-pink stars, which in the garden will rarely, if ever, be in- 

 duced to be more than an attractive neat flat mass of glossy almost 

 spiny-leaved close-packed rosettes, with a greater or less (usually 

 less) lavish allowance of comparatively pallid blossoms in summer. 

 At the same time, this is a merely personal feeling, and to many people 

 S. acaulis is gracious as the Grail ; nor are the huddled masses of colour 

 that it makes on the Alps (from end to end, from England to America, 

 from the Arctic circle to the Southern Alps), on lime or granites, any- 

 thing but a joy to behold as you see them lying in sheets of sheer pink 

 in the upmost shingles and rocky ridges, or making a shot-silken 

 effect of rose, in little grassy folds of the final alp, interthreaded with 

 fine grass, and blotted here and there with Gentiana verna in spring, 

 or G. bavarica a month later. Yet its colour is never clean, however 

 brilliant ; and, in many of those high places, if you go a little higher 

 yet, you come upon the no less solid but perfectly pure pink mats of 

 Androsace alpina, so clean and gentle and well-bred in their unsullied 

 radiance that one sickens evermore of the Silene, despite one's best 

 intentions and honest feelings of admiration — always compelled as 

 they are, by the memory of the Androsace, to feel a blatancy and an 

 underbred shrillness about the colour and even the habit of the Silene. 

 However, in the garden they are both memories, and likely to remain 

 so. The Silene will at least grow with the utmost readiness almost 

 anywhere in the sun, in light soil, and makes very fine cushions of 

 lucent emerald moss ; in the moraine it does quite well, and looks its 

 most characteristic , and often flowers more freely than elsewhere. 

 In the garden there are various forms of it — one with white blossoms — 

 such of them as they are (a poorish thin variety not at all uncommon 

 in the hills) ; and another with yellow morbid foliage, called golden, 

 becauso it is not green. The variety S. a. exscapa is usually seen at 

 higher elevations than the type, and is a specially miserable little thing, 



358 



