CARDAMINE. 
making rosettes of quite tiny spoon-shaped foliage, perfectly smooth 
and glossy and bright green, among which come shoots of several 
inches carrying a number of long pale-blue bells so oddly bulging and 
puckered at the mouth as to resemble nothing on earth so much as a 
tiny soda-water bottle with a ham-frill on the end. And these, in 
nature, are produced so late in bud that one wonders how they can ever 
manage to bloom, seeing that hardly any are open even when Sep- 
tember is already settling down upon the hills; just as one wonders, 
indeed, for what attraction or what defence its wisdcm has developed 
that extraordinary five-lobed pucker of the mouth, which is thus tightly 
closed, forming a five-rayed star of straight lines, and still further 
protected by a fluff of fine white inside the lips if you force them apart. 
In cultivation C. Zoysit is always spoken of with a dread and awe, 
attributable surely to its weird loveliness rather than to any trouble- 
someness in the plant’s own nature; the idea being that a thing so 
odd and crotchety in appearance must needs have a temper to match, 
This is not so; if C. Zoysii “dies on’ any gardener it will either be 
by slugs, or by that excessive care and loving-kindness which de- 
stroys so many precious alpine gems. Let C. Zoysit be put into a 
bed of rich limy loam, abounding in chips and rubble, perfectly 
drained, and watered perhaps from underground: then that fantastic 
little elf will there increase like C. Bellardii, and form almost rank 
tufts, bending about this way and that beneath the profuse weight of 
its pale and pinched fairy-phials, produced from July till the end of 
September (and in the moraine it simply grows a yard across and 
there is no holding it). In fact, under any good treatment in stony 
ground, sufficiently watered, drained and open, C. Zoysii may always 
be relied on to do its ample little best for you, if trusted so to do, and 
not incessantly cosseted and worried with attentions it does not want, 
But it must be safeguarded night and day from slugs, to whom it 
seems to be caviare and truffles and oysters all combined, attracting 
them even away from the rich feasts of C. Raineri and C. Elatines. 
There was once said to be—as indeed there ought to be, and must— 
a ravishing variety of virgin white; this was accordingly purchased 
for the vast sums commensurate to its worth. And the blossoms that 
ensued were of a finer blue than in any of the others. 
Cardamine, with one or two honourable exceptions, might be 
said to be a negligible race. CC. alpina, carnosa, resedifolia are poor 
straggling little alpine Crucifers, weedy and of no charm. C. asari- 
folia is equally undesirable in a large coarse style ; and there are many 
more of such, all the handsomer Cardamines having now gone away 
into Dentaria. The common Cuckoo-pint, or Lady’s-smock, remains - 
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