LEONTOPODIUM ALPINUM. 
of 8 inches or so, for the same treatment as these last, but with 
rather less of a boarding-house look, with glossy small foliage and 
looser heads of pink-budded white stars, much more pleasant and 
emancipated. 
Leonticé.—For treatment and general description, see under 
Bongardia, with which the race may almost be joined. Species that 
may be grown—all being yellow-flowered—are LL. Alberti, altaica, 
chrysogonum, and leontopetalum. (Often Caulophyllum.) 
Leontopodium alpinum.—tThe Flanneli-flower is of the easiest 
cultivation in any open place in light soil. It dreads wet and stagna- 
tion in winter, as becomes a desert plant ; and lime in abundance helps 
to keep white the whitened sepulchre of its sham flower. It can be 
grown admirably in window-boxes in London, where the smuts enhance 
its colour. Were it not for the idiotic superstitions and persistent rub- 
bish of romance that have gathered round this species, no one would 
refuse credit and even affection to its wide woolly stars of silver, which, 
in the garden as on the wild hills, take special value if grown in the 
moraine among clumps of violet-and-gold Aster alpinus. It is often 
a really beautiful sight, covering the highest lawns of the Alps with 
tufts of grey, and galaxies of pale flannel starfishes, as common 
Daisies cover an English tennis-court. But to call this plant an alpine, 
to imagine it rare and precious and difficult of attainment, this is 
to provoke the meekest into exposure of a fraud so impudent and 
foolish that thereby the merits of Edelweiss itself are unduly shamed 
and darkened. It is not an alpine at all; it belongs to the great 
central European and Asiatic deserts, but, being a very profuse seeder, 
has established itself on every mountain range of the Northern hemi- 
sphere in the Old World. It is not a rarity, but so universally 
common that you may rely on tramping acres of it on almost any 
alpine range above the altitude of 5500 feet ; but it is so far from 
being a typical and representative high-alpine that it never ascends 
beyond the fine mountain turf of some 7000 feet, more or less ; and it 
is so far from being difficult of attainment that on every such slope 
or final valley under the peaks, or ridge between them, one is treading 
dense flat lawns of it, in places where a dozen prams could race 
abreast without imperilling themselves, their conductors, or their 
inmates. Yet every season the misguided go dropping off precipices 
on which a few stray tufts have seeded down; not knowing 
that 200 feet higher, in the soft alpine grass, they could be picking 
basins-full of blossoms in half an hour’s gentle and octogenarian stroll 
before dinner. So the insane legend still continues, fostered by guides 
who make a practice, in front of the hotels, of seeming to quest Edel- 
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