230 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 



except to say that pretty, scentless, white neapolitanwm 

 is hardy, that blue hansuense, rosy, big-flowered ostrow- 

 skycmum, pretty, pink pulchellum, wee hierochunticum are 

 all attractive and often inoffensive ; common yellow Moly 

 is good for a rough, dryish bank, unworthy of choicer 

 stuff. Erdelii is a large, hideous novelty, with globes 

 of dullest grey-white; Schuberti is an immense, weird 

 creature, with huge, round, bomb-like heads^'of pink, pro- 

 jecting more flowers on longer stems all over the ball, in 

 the wildest and most Struewel-Peter manner. Trique- 

 trum, again, is pretty, of a dead, dull white, looking like 

 the ghost of a dead white bluebell, sodden in water. 

 This fills every vineyard in Liguria, and is a great rarity 

 in the neighbourhood of Bristol. 



And so we shake off the malodorous memory of the 

 Garlics and go forward, topping the slope, and finding 

 ourselves at last in the upmost levels. Now the stream 

 flows gently, between banks that are clothed with the 

 rosy snow of Silene acaulis, so dense with flower that each 

 yard-wide plant seems a mere mat of colour. Silene 

 acaulis has a vast woody taproot, impossible of collection, 

 but comes well from seed, and grows well, too, in any 

 open, well-drained place on the rock-work. But in culti- 

 vation it never flowers with anything approaching its 

 proper generosity. Perhaps the moraine-garden may 

 cause it to wake up. Exscapa is a form differing only in 

 the fact that the flowers have minute stems instead of 

 sitting flat on the cushion, and saxatilis, as far as I can see, 

 is indistinguishable. Silene rupestris is a pretty white- 

 flowered biennial for dryish places ; Silene alpestris, de- 

 spite its name, is a bog-plant of the very highest rank, 

 loving any fairly moist corner, and running riot in a mass 

 of narrow, glossy leaves, sending up, on stems of about a 

 foot, abundant loose showers of white flowers, circular, 

 and delicately notched all round. It seeds, too, in pro- 



