ARENARIA. 
A. pungens, Willkomm., is a Spanish species, from 8000 or 9000 
feet up in the Sierra Nevada, where it forms wide and crueily prickly 
mounds of thorny leaves, some 6 to 9 inches across. The blooms, 
which do not seem to have any especial merit, are solitary, or as 
many as three, carried on long stiff foot-stalks, the stem being clothed 
at intervals with pairs of long, spiny, very narrow leaves. It sounds 
as if, of the two pretenders to the name of Pungens, gardeners would 
most wisely choose A. Nuttallii—though indeed the glossy spiny 
masses of A. pungens have attraction in their place, forming a lucent 
but forbidding mat in the sun. 
A. purpurascens stands quite alone in the race, one of the most 
cherished of plants in-the garden, where it loves rather cooler exposures 
than the rest, as well may be, seeing that it comes from moist earth- 
pans and chinks of the mountains in Aragon and Catalonia. It forms, 
with us, dwarf, neat, loose masses of shoots, clothed in broadly-oval, 
pointed little foliage, dark-green and rather glossy. The blossoms sit 
close and cover the mats in July and August ; they are handsome and 
ample for the wide mass, and of a lovely delicate rose-lilac, seeming 
deeper at the centres. (Division or seed.) 
A. racemosa is a loose grower from Spain, about 2 or 3 inches high, 
with flowers not only from the ends of the shoots but also from the 
axils of the leaves that clothe them. 
A. sajanensis comes near the European A. biflora. It is densely 
glandular and hairy, with flopping leafy stems, the foliage being 
narrow and rather stiff, the flowers one to three on stems of an inch to 
two and a half. (North America.) 
A. Saxifraga is a very handsome but very variable species from the 
hills of Southern Europe. Its leaves are broadly ovate or rounded, 
and the stems carry, in many-blossomed showers, big white blooms as 
fine as an alpine Cerastium’s, with wide petals. This is A. Bertoloniw 
of Paoli and Fioretti, varying into forms distinguished as A. ttalica, 
Salis, Burnatii, and Morisii. 
A. saxosa, from Colorado, is glaucous-green and rather fleshy in its 
tufts, with flowers of no remarkable value in loose array on stems 
of 5 inches or so. 
A. Stracheyi makes a perfectly bald and hairless minute tuft on the 
high stony places of Tibet, and the stars that cover it are about 
three-quarters of an inch across. 
A. tetraquetra is well known in our gardens. It is a species of 
South Europe. It is akin to A. erinacea, with leaves arranged in the 
same dense pairs, first one way and then the other, so as to look like 
four regular rows. But the tuffet is larger, and the leaves are 
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