DIANTHUS. 
and narrow and not pointed, with the leaves at the base so rough 
with a fringe of hair as almost to seem toothed. The flowers are borne 
solitary at the ends of the flopping or ascending 12-inch shoots, which 
vary between 6 and 9 inches or more, and are large, rosy, fringy, and 
specially fragrant. (From the dunes of Northern France, &c.) 
D. gelidus belongs to D. glacialis. 
D. glacialis has a name beyond its merits, and a reputation alike 
for difficulty and for beauty that it does little to earn. For it avoids 
glaciers and their neighbourhood with great heartiness, and is a plant 
of the alpine turf, which it abundantly occupies at the high levels of 
the Engadine, or on the Pasterze moor above Heiligenblut, there even 
descending into the gutters by the highway side. Nor is its beauty 
so rich, though sufficient enough: a taprooted species, forming a 
single clump of bright-green leaves rather long, broad and blunt, 
and producing among them, each on its stem, flowers of bright pink 
indeed, but hardly of an amplitude to elicit cries. In fact, though the 
clump be only a couple of inches high, it has not the look of breeding 
and charm that one expected of a Dianthus called Glacialis. As for 
its reputation in the garden, this dates from those pernicious days of 
pockets, when it was indeed looked upon and found (like almost 
everything else) a miff and a mimp, no matter what elaborate pains 
were taken with stone and aspect and shade and special mixtures of 
soil—on a rock-work essentially undrained and ill-constructed and 
ill-soiled, with just a small pecked hollow here and there which you 
filled with made compost for the imagined behoof of some special 
treasure. No wonder, then, that in those days alpines as a class were 
regarded with awe, and approached with genuflexions of terror. Now, 
however, we have learned that the only right course is to build the 
rock-work properly throughout, from base to top, in the beginning of 
things, and that then there is hardly a child of the hills that will not 
prove naturally at home, or can ere long be made to. We have no more 
pockets, but our gardens are made and mounded with light and well- 
mixed soils, with the result that all the glamour has gone from D. 
glacialis, and all the glory of growing it successfully ; seeing that in 
any open situation, well-watered in summer (and for preference from 
underground), and in any sound and stony mixture of peat and leaf- 
mould and rough sand, this Dianthus at once makes a fat little clump 
of green foliage, and covers itself with rosy cartwheels all the summer. 
through. In decline it should be kept drier; and the plant, it must 
be remembered, has the lushness of its look—a soft thing strayed un- 
advisedly upon the mountains—and may, if too generous in flower, 
damp off in the ensuing winter, supposing that a slug has not saved it 
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