182 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 



their large Leopard's Bane flowers of a clear, rather shrill 

 yellow. But the flowers, though enormous, are weak in 

 substance, undistinguished in appearance, and uninterest- 

 ing in colour ; I cannot greatly love them, though the 

 memory of them has lured me so high upon the hills, 

 and though they are robust, unexacting and persistent in 

 any sort of cultivation, however brutal. Far better, a 

 hundred times better, do I love the Arnica, growing, as it 

 does, a thousand feet lower on the Alps, among the 

 varieties and hybrids of the big ugly Gentians, purpurea 

 and lutea. And Arnica, when once you have gratified its 

 morbid passion for peat, is as easy to grow in the rock- 

 work as any daisy, though slugs or mice have a tender- 

 ness for its buds and shoots. Every year, on a copsy 

 shoulder of my peat-bed, among the straggling boughs 

 of Cistus laurifolius, come up my masses of Arnica, in 

 greater and greater abundance, their sweet, acrid, hearten- 

 ing fragrance, when bruised, blending delightfully with 

 the haunting violet-fragrance of the Cistus. Not that 

 my Arnicas are in shade ; far from it ; sun and exposure 

 they require ; the Cistus merely throws frail tentacular 

 branches here and there towards them. Arnica is, par 

 excellence, the dear plant of promise ; when, on the bare 

 hillside, amid the brown herbage, you first begin to see 

 its ragged great orange stars rising high above the ground- 

 hugging rosette of broad, pale soft leaves, pleated and 

 silky, then you realise that only a few score feet of 

 arduous climbing still separate you from the high stony 

 lands where Androsace and glacier-Buttercup run riot. 

 Once, too, I found a couple of Arnicas that carried 

 blossoms of a very pale sulphur-yellow ; but these, though 

 I collected them and nursed them carefully, never did any 

 good and, I think, have since passed away. It is here to 

 be noted, by the way, that Arnica has immense voracious 

 whipthong roots, which must be allowed ample pastur- 



