ARNICA. 
Pyrenees of Aragon. Here the leaves are broader, and outspread 
in a dense and tidy series of rosettes, the inner ones being flatter and 
narrower, keeled, very daintily dotted with lime—most graceful in 
effect. The stems are as fat as the foliage, the flowers are pink or 
white, about half an inch across, in round heads at the top of 12-inch 
stems. Closely similar is A. Dwriaez, but here the leaves are green and 
neither limy nor stiff, while the flowers are rather larger. 
A. splendens—not to be confused with horticultural varieties called 
“‘Splendens”’ of the commoner Thrifts—is a magnificent high-alpine 
species from the bare earth-pans and screes and muddy places of the 
Sierra Nevada, &c., where it abounds between 8000 to 10,000 feet. 
This forms very dense tufts of rosettes, with many frail and delicate 
little stems of 2 or 3 inches emerging from them, and each carrying a 
large head of large and rosy flowers, together with bracts that turn 
a brilliant purple. There are, of course, countless other Thrifts, 
but the above list should cover, I hope, the most distinct species in 
a large and often rather indistinguishable family. 
Arnebia has now lost all its loveliest members, which will be 
found in the fold of Macrotomia. 
Arnica.—Gay, handsome Composites of the high-alpine turf in 
the Old and the New World. Every traveller well knows the gorgeous 
golden suns of the one species in the European Alps, A. montana, with 
its basal rosettes of large oval foliage, flannelly and soft and puckered 
as it lies in a rosette on the ground, and then sends up the stalwart 
stem, wearing a pair or so of leaves opposite to each other—a very 
rare peculiarity in Composites. The flower-stem often splits in two 
equal erect stalks, each carrying a flower, with a third on the much 
shorter original stem in the middle. A. montana is extremely abundant 
in the high turf of the Alpine chain, more often on the granitic 
ranges, though not especially. In some parts of the Dolomites it 
makes a show of extraordinary golden glory among the filmy flowering 
grasses, in contrast with the no less abundant great china-blue bearded 
bells of Campanula barbata ; while on the Col de Pesio, in early August, 
you look down upon a solid firmament of its suns, through which come 
shooting in myriads the long sweet lilac spires of Gymnadenia odora- 
tissima. Nothing of all this does Arnica seem to achieve in cultiva- 
tion, where it often seems a rather unsatisfactory mimp, no matter 
how carefully you may plant it in full sun in beds of well-drained stony 
peat. There are, however, beside this, other Arnicas of the New 
World, in no way approaching A. montana in gorgeousness, but often 
with a charm of their own, though more in the style of some daintier 
Crepis or Hieracium. These should be tried in the same stony cool 
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