DRABA. 
and especially on the non-calcareous ranges (though by no means ex- 
clusively so), as anyone can bear witness who has seen it sheeting the 
flawed boulders of the Mont Cenis in such floods of citron-gold, so 
cunningly applied in all the right fissures and ledges, that the gardener 
yearns to dig up the whole complete and compendious rock-garden at 
once, and bring it home as itis. This is a local species, only occurring 
on the Southern rims of Switzerland, but spasmodically ranging 
through all the Eastern and Western Alps, to the Pyrenees on the one 
hand and Venetia on the other, but becoming, as a rule, less frequent 
or happy as it descends into the South on the Cottians and Maritimes. 
Where, however, it is found at all, it is found, like most local plants, 
in the most prodigal abundance, clothing the rocks and stony patches 
and the very path-sides in loose flat spreading masses of rambling 
greenish-grey shoots, finely narrow and juniperine and delicate, but 
wholly hidden from view by the profusion of its long-throated wide- 
trumpeted flowers of pure citron, looking exactly like dropped 
carpets of some smaller yellow jasmine, its colour having so special a 
clarity and lucence that you can recognise it from far away on the 
mountain side, among all the other conflicting commoner, cruder 
yellows in which the flanks of the great alps are clad in June. It 
varies but little; the Mont Cenis yielded once a lovely form with 
flowers of palest lemon, but the « novelties ” offered in catalogues of 
specialities as A. praetutiiana and A. cinerea are merely forms of D. 
Vitaliana, varying in the amount of greyness in which the foliage is 
invested. In cultivation the plant takes a little time to recover the 
annoyance of being removed from its native turf or gravel-slide ; its - 
hard rat-tail roots, dark-brown and woody, make no hurry in seeking 
new sustenance, and patience has to be exercised with collected pieces, 
which, however, offer the only original means of securing the Douglasia. 
But if the clump be left alone accordingly to sulk awhile in the sand-bed, 
fresh tufts of evergreen foliage will ere long come pushing from below, 
and, in a season’s time the restored specimen can be put out into 
any open wholesome slope, in very deep and light and well-drained 
stony ground, either of ordinary loam relieved by sand, or with an 
admixture of peat and leaf-mould to enrich it. Once there, the plant 
must be left alone for ever and ever to get bigger and bigger each 
year, forming a wider and wider carpet of neat green-grey shoots, 
upon which the favour of spring will produce you the golden flowers 
in numbers so tactful as never by any means to debar you from con- 
templation of the foliage. 
Drahba, a family of the first rank for decorating even the choicest 
and most prominent places in the choicest rock-garden ledge or 
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