128 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 



build. However it is an easy doer, and a favourite with 

 many people, though it no longer finds a place on my 

 rock-gardens. Amphiocarpus Neumeyeri is a strange hardy 

 plant — and where I got it I do not know. Its attraction 

 is the tuft of oval-pointed silver leaves ; the small flowers, 

 when they come, are rather dowdy. The Antennarias 

 are best represented by our own precious little native, 

 Antennaria dioica — a creeping weed, but very valuable for 

 a waste bank, with small hoary leaves and chaffy little 

 heads of white or rose-pink like a wee everlasting. 



Of the Thistles, what gardener wants to be reminded ? 

 ' Titfandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem.'' I once, re- 

 gardless of wisdom and warnings, had Carduus eriophorus, 

 from seed collected on cliff^s near Scarborough ; but this 

 giant of his race died out after flowering, and I have 

 never replaced him, fearful lest a worse thing befall me. 

 For, of the two alternatives, reproduction or extinction, 

 the gardener will certainly be thankful for extinction 

 where most of the Thistles are concerned. The one excep- 

 tion is Onopordon bracteatum, who sins in the opposite 

 direction. For Onopordon bracteatum — so beautiful that 

 there is no need ever again to think of any other Ono- 

 pordon, makes huge rosettes of crinkled spiny leaves, 

 brilliant silver grey, with veins of pure silver. And when 

 the vast candelabra of rather inferior purple flowers has 

 been sent up and matured, the whole thing dies, and 

 there are you, plante la, with the Onopordon to raise again 

 from the very beginning from seed. However, for high, 

 bold places on the rock-work, Onopordon is eminently 

 worth the trouble ; and his seed has, at least, the virtue 

 of germinating freely. 



Carduncellus is a wee thing, like a small blue-purple 

 Thistle, quite close to the ground, who is attractive in 

 any barren place ; while Carlina acaulis is a very beautiful 

 Alpine, which you will see in August and September, all 



