NEW AND BEAUTIFUL ROCK PLANTS 117 



Praecox, lilac flowers, is a very early bloomer. Wilsoni 

 has rose flowers. 



SAPONARIA. There are one or two good varieties of 

 oceymoides, the Rock Soapwort, notably splendens. 



SAXIFRAGES. When one surveys the long, indeed 

 almost interminable, list of species in the genus Saxifraga 

 one feels disposed to say : Here at least there must be 

 enough material to satisfy the most exacting flower- 

 lover, and the hybridist finds no encouragement for his 

 operations. There is no limit, however, to the appetite 

 of plantsmen. It is unsatiated and insatiable. The 

 general rock gardener is content to stop when his col- 

 lection embraces all the best species of the principal 

 genera, but behind him there is the specialist, whose 

 interest is centred in one genus alone. Given a flower- 

 lover whose devotion to Saxifrages is as ardent and 

 intense as that of another is for Roses, can we wonder 

 that even a list of two hundred species is not enough ? 

 There are, at a moderate computation, two thousand 

 varieties of Roses in commerce, but amateurs still cry 

 out for more; and so the cross-fertilizer peers among 

 his thousands of seedlings year by year, searching for 

 some shade of difference that shall justify the distribu- 

 tion of certain varieties as novelties. That extension of 

 specialization which has led to such extraordinary de- 

 velopments in Sweet Peas, Carnations and other popular 

 flowers may be expected to embrace all the principal 

 genera of Alpines now that the culture of rock plants has 

 become so popular. While the intrepid travellers of the 

 great nurserymen ransack the distant places of the earth 

 for species unknown to commerce, patient hybridists 

 will work in quiet garden places on the species which we 

 already have, crossing and intercrossing, mating variety 



