My Garden in Spring 



several feet in height, but seldom finds life in a garden 

 sufficiently worth living to stay there long enough to 

 exceed one foot. Its large, round, woolly leaves are 

 very striking, as they are of an unusual shade of grey- 

 green, but the male catkins are its chief glory, from the 

 moment they burst their bud-scales and appear as white 

 as snow till they have successively imitated blue Persian 

 kittens and yellow hairy caterpillars and, their pollen shed, 

 they fall to the ground. Several almost microscopic 

 plants, such as Arenaria balearica, Epilobium nummula- 

 rifolium, Mentha Requienii smelling so strongly of Pepper- 

 mint, Erodium Reichardii, and Veronica repens make carpets 

 under the small trees. At the corner of this bank Saxi- 

 frages behave better than in most parts of this dry garden, 

 and S. Burseriana, Salomonii, Elizabethae, oppositifolia, 

 and sancta are here, also taygetea looking like Soldanella 

 in leaf, and tenella, which I was told by its donor I should 

 not be able to keep long, but has been happy in this, 

 the original site I allotted it, for at least twelve years, 

 an instance of the inevitable happening of the unexpected. 

 I wish S. oppositifolia would do a little better here; it 

 occasionally flowers well and encourages me to plant 

 more, and then for a season or two may look brown and 

 bedraggled, in fact "a positive failure" as a lady once 

 called it. I sat down on a carpet of it to eat my sandwich 

 luncheon up in the Cottian Alps, last June, and looked at 

 the rosy cushions and longed to see a slope of the rock 

 garden similarly furnished, but though S. retusa has settled 

 down most amicably in the piped sand bed, and flowered 

 well this Spring, oppositifolia by its side is slowly dying. 

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