80 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 



Pinks are a difficult race ; I am reminded, by my memories 

 of Arolla, that certain seedling Pinks, of which I held out 

 great hopes in My Rock-Garden, as due to bloom that 

 year in unheard-of loveliness, turned out, after all, to be 

 dull, fringy dowdies of a most vapid and milky descrip- 

 tion. These came to me under such high titles as 

 cinnamomeus and pruinosiis. Only cinnabarinvs failed to 

 bloom, and so, most likely, to disappoint. The postponed 

 disappointment, I already fear, is no less certain than the 

 bloom. 



And so, past copse and meadow, the track leads on 

 and on, until at last we come to the Mont CoUon Hotel 

 itself, sitting lonely at Arolla (which is only a name) 

 above a marsh full of Saxifraga aeizoeides. And in front 

 of this there is nothing but the gaunt, promising desola- 

 tion of stone stretching up to the feet of tiie Mont 

 Collon, whose vast bulk closes in the grim little valley. 

 To the right rises another big humped mountain, the 

 Pigne d' Arolla, carrying a few sparse old specimens of 

 Pinus Cembra on its rust-coloured screes. But the hotel 

 stands on the fringe of the last woodland, and the other 

 slope of the glen is clothed rather with copse and tangle 

 of Pinus montana than with any more notable tree. High 

 and high above all this stretches, against the blue, the 

 saw-line of the mountain-ridge, so fiercely planned as to 

 be hardly patient of any snow. Midway stands up the 

 Aiguille de la Zd, a stark pinnacle like some gigantic 

 saurian's tooth, no less waspish and deadly than its hiss- 

 ing mosquito-cry of a name. Standing there before the 

 hotel, as darkness gently cools the air of the mountains, 

 a gardener alone will understand perhaps how the heart 

 of a gardener bounds to think that he has escaped the 

 fertile, unprofitable land of meadow and forest, that 

 he has come at last to the territory of great open 

 spaces, of that illimitable, gorgeous desolation, which 



