BETWEEN DIANTHUS AND EPILOBIUM 107 



featherings of deep purple that give it the daintiest, slyest 

 expression. Cheilanthifolium is lovely, with leaves like 

 a fern, and dark pencillings on its pure white petals. 

 Sibthorbianum is silver grey, and rose-colour; supra- 

 canum. Queen of Queens, has hoary whitened leaves, and 

 flowers of clear pink. All these are so delightful that 

 there is no rivalry. One must have them, every one of 

 them, without exception. The only Erodium to be care- 

 ful about is Manescavi, a stalwart, great coarse thing 

 which will grow anywhere, with large handsome flowers 

 of an even more truculent magenta-crimson than those 

 of Geranium sanguineum. Personally I like the others so 

 very, very much, in their self-conscious, sweet refinement, 

 elfin and ethereal as Melisande, that I am all the more 

 set against the rank gaudiness of this herbaceous weed. 



The Wood-sorrels, in a race of awful little pretty 

 pests, have the privilege of giving us one of the very best 

 of all alpine plants — a species so serenely beautiful and 

 so easy to grow, that it counts certainly among the first 

 six plants to be mentioned for the rock-garden. (Alas 

 for the others ! I have come on three candidates in as 

 many pages.) Oocalis enneaphylla hails from the Falk- 

 land Isles, and makes himself tight little scaled bulbs 

 like a miniature Lilium Auratuvi, which sit safe and quiet 

 underground all the winter. With spring appear the 

 glaucous grey leaves, each like a crinkled cluster of leaf- 

 lets, on stems about four inches high ; then, nestling 

 among them, goodly white convolvulus-flowers, of a deli- 

 cious brilliant colour, softened to a pearly richness by the 

 very faintest suggestion of flesh-pink. I don't know any 

 more wholly worshipful Alpine than Oxalis enneafhylla, 

 and (whether or no our cool climate has anything to say 

 to it), its hardy thriftiness is quite equal to its beauty. 

 I stuffs it away anyhow in loam on some shady ledge, and 

 leave it quite unattended. Even in the fiercest or the 



