THLASPI. 



Th. nevadense is a smooth and bright green tuffet, many-rosetted, 

 in the shingles and highest crevices of the Sierra Nevada, with all 

 the small obovate leaves entire, or just a little scalloped. The many 

 stems are 2 or 3 inches high, carrying large heads of large white 

 blossoms. 



Th. ochroleucum copies Th. montanum and bears its yellow flower- 

 heads on the musical slopes of Helicon. 



Th. pumilum is sometimes called Hutchinsia pumila. It is a 

 Caucasian plant, exactly like Th. rotundifolium. but with white flowers. 



Th. rotundifolium — the IberideUa of bygone years — is the special 

 treasure and glory of the highest shingles throughout the Alps, but 

 always more especially on the limestone or sandstones, where, from its 

 great tap-root, it forms, by means of shoots beneath the shingles, wide 

 mats of tuffetted rosettes of fat, dark, broad little oval leaves, 

 thick and fleshy and waxy-smooth, and of a livid iron sombreness of 

 colour, over which are borne hi summer, in a profusion that hides the 

 mass, great fattened heads of large and most deliciou sly-fragrant 

 flowers of tender rosy -lavender. It is a most widespread and most 

 abundant high-alpine of the dreary shingles and wet stony places 

 by the birthplace of the streams in the uppermost hollows of the hills. 

 But it is also quite local and rather variable. For instance, in the Mont 

 Cenis it is both sparse and comparatively poor, straggling in form, 

 and dotted here and there, instead of colouring the stone-slopes as it 

 does when you get East into the Dolomites, where, in the most austere 

 places, such as that amphitheatre of huge emptiness up behind the 

 Grasleiten Hut, under the overwhelming walls of the Anternioja and 

 the Kesselkogel and the Great Valbuon, all the slopes are set with 

 those fragrant rosy turrets, concise and ample and free, cushions of 

 lilac sweetness breaking the pale white desolations with little ringing 

 cries of colour in that vast home of silence. And thus it is, too, through- 

 out all the screes of the Dolomites, even in the very highway-sides on 

 the crest of the Falzarego Pass, abundant and rich and lovely as in no 

 other range that I can call to mind, though on the Grigna it is also 

 abundant and beautiful, even if much looser and more straggling in 

 form ; while on Baldo it haunts the roughest shingles only, and is only 

 occasionally there to be seen at its best. In the garden it wants all 

 the reverence accorded to the rest, and deserves it far more than all 

 except Th. limosellaefolium, cepeaefolium. and oellidifolium (of what 

 persistent plagiarism are these three most beautiful members of the 

 race accused by their names !) It should have sunny calcareous 

 moraine of ample depth, with water flowing far beneath ; then there 

 is little doubt of its prosperity and generosity with its lovely flowers; 



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