CAMPANULA. 
scattered haphazard across the arid expanses of the lower alpine 
shingles, where it is at home, is one of the garden problems completely 
solved by the moraine. Before that invention C. alpestris was one 
of the hardest of alpine Campanulas, and got a notorious name ; but 
now, in the moraine, it has turned one of the easiest, and even begins 
to think about becoming a weed. In cultivation it blooms, too, 
much earlier than on its own hills, and is usually over by mid-June. 
In nature it ranges through the Graian, Cottian, and Maritime dis- 
tricts, occurring always in rocky stony ground, and often among rough 
grasses and weeds, at elevations not necessarily high-alpine. Indeed, 
the plant does not usually climb to the upmost shingles where Viola 
cenisia is at home with the white buttercups; its favoured places are 
in lower and harder, more earth-bound slopes of stone, where its huge 
tap goes plunging deep, and its branches wander round far and wide, 
sending up tufts of leafage at their end when the fancy takes them. It 
is by no means true that C. alpestris says « all or nothing” when you go 
to collect it ; for the smallest runner, if inserted carefully into the sand- 
bed, and kept’ reasonably moist, will make a sound-rooted youngling 
in about a month’s time. On various hills the type varies greatly, 
unlike the others of the high-alpine group (to which indeed it does not 
belong, but is much more closely akin to some of the noble dwarf 
single-flowered Bells of the Levant). On the Mont Cenis the prevalent 
form, for instance, has very narrow foliage, almost silvery-grey in 
effect, and the flowers are usually rather small and pinched and pale. 
Broad foliage as a rule spells amplitude of bell; in the Cottians and 
the Maritimes occur forms with much wider softer foliage of bright 
green, often waved and curly, whose stemless stems carry immense 
solid ample flowers of the most gorgeous satiny purple. These forms, 
too, are as a rule of much freer habit and more rapid increase. All 
alike are in common cultivation, but the broad-leaved splendour was 
that sent out by Backhouse in former days, which has sometimes, 
therefore, seemed to dispossess the narrow-leaved grey squin of later 
collectors. Finally, though C. alpestris is in nature so passionate a 
cleaver to the non-calcareous ranges, it is by no means certain that 
in cultivation this fact is not more of a general hint than a rigid pre- 
scription. In many gardens it is already beginning to develop some- 
thing not unlike a fancy for lime; and though such guidances of 
nature give good general help at starting with a new species, it never 
does to adopt and insist upon them as laws of the Medes and 
Persians. “Souvent plante varie, bien fol est qui s’y fie”’ to the 
absolute dogmatic rules laid down by those in whom experience has 
not bred a knowledge of the facts. 
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