96 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 



much unfits them for certain tastes. Lagascae, though, 

 is a precious little plant from the Pyrenees, with bright, 

 pure pink flowers with a white eye, a true rock-plant, 

 rather inclined to be petulant and miffy in temper, 

 demanding a well-drained fissure, from which, if happy, it 

 sprouts like a bush, bearing abundance of blossom till 

 quite late in the season. Pyrenaica is near it, but white, 

 or pale pink. This I have grown, but lost some years 

 ago, and have never replaced. 



Lychnis alpina and Lychnis lapponica are so close to 

 each other as not to be easily distinguishable from a 

 gardener's point of view — both small tufty plants with 

 tight, short-stemmed heads of magenta crimson or lilac 

 flowers, varying to white. Alpina is a rare native, found 

 on Hobcartin Fell in Cumberland, and both species are 

 Northerners of the easiest cultivation, but not, to me, of 

 any great charm, owing to the impurity of their colour. 

 Lychnis Viscaria, with its double and splendens varieties, 

 resembles a magnified alpina in every way, and labours 

 (with the new Sartorii) under exactly the same disabilities 

 and advantages. As for the double white form of our 

 common native vespertina, it is rare, easy, and decidedly 

 pretty in its way. Of the Saponarias, ocymoeides splen- 

 didissima is indeed a splendid, good-natured trailer, to fall 

 over a sunny rock in a dazzling sheet of rosy blossom. 

 The rarer species, Saponaria wiemanniana, is a novelty 

 which I am trying, which is reported to make free-flower- 

 ing tufts of pink. Caespitosa is a good thing, making 

 larger tufts of paler blossom. Lutea is a curious and 

 very attractive Saponaria — low-growing, with short- 

 stemmed heads of pale safiton flowers. She dwells in 

 the Piedmontese Alps and blooms in July or August, 

 very delightfully, with blackish stamens to enhance her 

 flowers. Her constitution is not, I believe, absolutely 

 trustworthy, but I have never had much difficulty with 



