120 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 



gold flower-heads. Eryngium glaciate, in defiance of its 

 name, is a Spaniard, and, I believe, very seldom seen. 

 It was given to me by a kind gardener near Cam- 

 forth, where it throve in rather a casual place on the 

 rock-work, and gave fertile seed. I, misled by its minute 

 appearance and glacial name, planted it reverently in the 

 moraine. However, it did not take this misguided atten- 

 tion amiss, for it unfolded its little tufts as complacently 

 as ever — until ultimately, alas ! a slug made, in one night, 

 an utter end of Eryngium and all my joy together. 



The true Eryngium alpinum and its form superbum are 

 really the very best of the ordinary Sea-Hollies — rare 

 plants rather, in the Alps, though I have once seen the 

 type above St. Martin Vesubie. Its huge frilly blue 

 collar and solid blue flower-head, topping the broidered 

 blue and silver foliage, give it a Byzantine beauty ; other 

 good kinds, though not better, are Bov/rgati, planifolium, 

 and Olivieri. As for the Pandanus - leaved section — 

 pandanifolium and Serra and so forth, no persuasion can 

 make me think them anything but ugly, — with their 

 enormous yucca-like leaves, and their mean little tiny 

 dull flower-heads on stout promising stems. However, as 

 'Formes architecturales ' for bold landscape gardening 

 these plants no doubt have a value. Only not in 

 the rock-garden. As for the pretty little Bupleurums, 

 with their umbels of golden buttercup-like blossoms, I 

 have never been able either to collect them successfully 

 hitherto or to raise them from seed. And, with them 

 expires, I think, the possibilities of the Umbrella-bearers. 



The small scattered orders that intervene between the 

 great horticultural Sahara of Umbelliferae, and the greater 

 horticultural Sahara of Compositae, give us a good many 

 valuable things. In the first place, Araliaceae gives us 

 (beside the minute and fascinating miniature ivy, Hedera 

 minima) the magnificent ' Udo,' Aralia cordata, a common 



