SOLDAXELLA. 



alpine, not a sub-alpine * pedes, occurring only upon the high and open 

 hills, and there in quantities so enormous as to colour the world. It 

 is much smaller and more compressed in habit than S. montana, and 

 forms into dense mats and lawns and masses of smaller rounded leaves, 

 perfectly untoothed at the edge. The stems are only some 3 inches 

 or so, carrying smaller, fewer deep flowers, freaked inside with crimson, 

 and of narrower, straight-sided outline, fringy like all the family indeed, 

 bul not opening wide into the ragged splendid saucer of S. montana, 

 and carried towards the tops of the stems, instead of here and there, in 

 the much looser and more lavish spray of that much more noble and 

 sumptuous plant — a Bpecies that has so undeservedly been obscured by 

 its inferior cousin that in most popular handbooks, such as Stuart 

 Chompson'fl Alpine Plants of Europe, and Correvon's Atlas de la Flore 

 Alpine, there is no mention of it at all, despite its unquestionable 

 regality in the race. In cultivation S. alpina will do with more water, 

 though no less easy than the others ; and will be especially happy in 

 the underground-watered grit-beds, that remind it of the deliquescent 

 snowfields where it dances in its maddest happiness. It would be 

 happier still with us, indeed, if we could give it the snow-carpet that it 

 loves with so warm a heart in winter as to generate (according to 

 romance) heat enough of its own to melt the coverlet and come 

 poking through into the world before the w r hiteness has gone. 



S. hungarica has S. carpathica, Vierh., and S. pyrolaefolia, Schott, 

 Nyman, &c, for its discarded subsequent synonyms. The second 

 one is to be regretted, for it neatly sums up its habit, which otherwise 

 is smaller in stature than S. montana, with fewer lessened flowers of a 

 bluer-lavender, on a stem of some 4 or 5 inches. Its leaves are usually 

 perfectly smooth-edged, instead of with the remote scalloping that is 

 practically invariable in the other. 8. hungarica is wholly oriental in 

 its distribution, coming no further West than the Hochschneeberg and 

 the Raxalpe below Vienna, and ranging thence through all the Car- 

 pathians to the Balkans, in the same situations as 8. montana, at the 

 same sub-alpine elevations. In gardens it is rare : in catalogues 

 obscure. 



8. minima (8. austriaca, 8. cyclophylla, Vierh.) has the same 

 narrowed bell and shallow fringe as in 8. pusitta, but is a smaller 

 are yet, hardly ever achieving more than one flower to a 

 stem of only an inch or two. It may always bo known, stature and 

 flower apart, by the fact that its very fat dark little round leaves are 

 almost like JUit salt-spoons on their stems, perfectly round in outline; 

 whereas in 8. pusitta they swell into an open and rery shallow, but 

 quite definite rounded lobe on either side, so as to bo of a kidney- 



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