76 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 



soil must be cleared away before the Great Light can 

 penetrate its husk and ripen it to germination. 



Over the sun-trodden slopes of grass the mule-track 

 mounts to Arolla. The scant, browned herbage wavers in 

 the heat. Little lizards pant in ecstasy on the burning 

 stones of the low wall that skirts the cobbled ascent. A 

 hot fragrance of life and flowers throbs round one as one 

 goes, and from each burning surface of rock rise on stiff, 

 sticky stalks the rosy star-clusters of Sempervivum arach- 

 noideum. Rosy I call them, and rosy they are in our pale 

 air, but there, in that blaze, they are fire-red, glowing, 

 incandescent. And their mats of round rosettes, too, are 

 silver white with dense tomentum. In England we can 

 rarely hope to see the bloom as brilliant, the little balls 

 as snowy with down. The heat it is that achieves both 

 miracles of beauty, and my climate, to speak for myself 

 alone, has no friendly torridness for the Houseleeks. 

 They live — oh yes, they live — and even thrive in a pallid 

 way, but never do they attain the solid silver, the intense 

 glow, that transfigured them on a sun-baked slope 

 of Switzerland. My wet winters martyrise them, my 

 uncertain summers perplex and bore them. On one rock, 

 indeed, in the Old Garden, I had once tectorum, arach- 

 noideum, and Laggeri thriving excellently. Then my 

 manager and I read Clarke's book on Alpines, put our 

 heads together in a pious and humble spirit, and, as the 

 author warmly enjoined, planted all our Sempervivums 

 anew in a mixture of clay and cow-manure. With the 

 result that they unanimously languished and expired. 



All the Sempervivums, in fact — and they are legion ; I 

 might consume pages in analysing and noting the minute 

 differences that make up the two hundred species or more 

 that are cultivated — are sun-worshippers of the purest 

 Zoroastrian zeal. Of them all, arachnoideum, with its 

 lovely variety transalpinum, is my favourite. Tectorum, 



