ANDROSACE. 
woollen blanket, taking sun-cures in the hardest and hottest black 
granite precipices of the Southern Alps, where along the adamantine 
walls its minute masses look as if someone had poked in lines of cotton 
wool in pads, so dense is the silver-whiteness of its close wads, 
recalling otherwise those of Helvetica, but that its blunt little leaves, 
even if not longer, are much less fat, and so have not the incurved 
effect. A. imbricata is invariably faithful to the granite, in its hardest 
cliffs and in its very hottest and driest aspects. It is, accordingly, 
not only a most difficult plant to collect, but also the most difficult 
of its section to grow, requiring rather the treatment of a tropical 
Opuntia than that of a high-alpine Androsace. It is one of the species 
confined to the central and seaward Alps—Graians, Valais, Oberland 
(rare), Cottians, and Maritimes (common)—descending through the 
Pyrenees to the Sierra Nevada; it seems to grow more and more 
abundant as it comes South, and in the Cottian ranges drops to quite 
low elevations, in very torrid exposures above Bobbio; and may be 
seen abounding on the Southern face of Monte Moro, or above Arolla 
towards the Col de Bertol, or in the high places of the Maritimes 
sharing the iron cliffs of the Ciriegia and the Boréon with Sazifraga 
florulenta, though the Saxifrage is still far down in bud when the 
Androsace is covering its snow-white cushions with a profusion of 
rather small stars which there, though always by courtesy described 
as white, seem in reality to be of so impure a tone as to verge upon 
a pale and rather dirty yellow. 
A.lactea takes us back to the section of A.carneaand A. Chamaejasme, 
and is a welcome change from the perversities of the Aretia group. 
For A. lactea is only alpine and sub-alpine, its glossy spiny-looking 
bright dark-green mats of glossy rosettes (each more than an inch 
across, and the whole mass often about 8 inches) being found in the 
upper grass-land of the mountain region through the limestone Alps 
from the Jura away to Transylvania. From the flattened towzle of 
glossy narrow little foliage about ?- to 14-inch long there spring gra- 
cious 8-inch stems, often less in nature and often more in the garden, 
which break quite soon into a head of blossom—if one can so describe 
the long delicate stems that spray about this way and that—each one 
supporting a single lovely large white flower with a golden eye, the 
effect being that of a loose and scattering rocket of blossom. The 
whole plant, besides being of vigorous constitution, is entirely smooth 
and hairless, consequently it is as much more vigorous even than 
Carnea as its habit is larger and laxer; in the garden it runs freely 
about, shooting up fresh rosettes from underground, and taking 
happy possession of any light and pleasant strip of well-drained alpine 
51 
