RAMBLES WITH A TROWEL.' 



105 



For, allowing for the difference in quality and vitality between 

 fresh and home-reared plants on the one hand, and travel-worn 

 specimens on the other, we can, even already, buy them at home 

 more cheaply in the long run than we can supply ourselves from 

 abroad even in quantity. At least, speaking broadly and generally, 

 that is so ; it is only not true of the few plants which on one 

 ground or another we often cannot buy in quantity, or perhaps 

 at all, and so must collect if we want them. 



We collect not to save money, but first because we enjoy the 

 hunt, and next because " our collected" plants have for us an 

 " extra value " by reason of some pleasurable association con- 

 nected with their acquisition. 



That plant of Eritrichium nanum — reminder of the place 

 where, at last, first in your life, you suddenly came upon it in 

 the mountain fastness and solitude nine thousand feet up ; that 

 plant of the lovely Saxifraga squamosa, to get which lured you 

 on to a vast torrent of loose stones, ready to travel at express 

 speed with you and your plant to the bottom, a thousand feet 

 down ; that other plant which Schmidt, the great German 

 cragsman, brought you in his pocket from some mountain fastness 

 which thus you are glad to visit by so famous a deputy — how 

 shall the value of such be appraised in pounds, shillings and 

 pence ? 



You are made happy by finding the bright pink variety of 

 Aster alpinus, though the "find" is no fortune to you; and 

 when you light upon a Saponaria ocymoides, as you easily 

 may, brighter than Backhouse's splendens variety — brighter 

 even than his latest splendidissima — your happiness is that 

 of the hunter, and not of the nurseryman, amateur or profes- 

 sional. 



And now a word or two upon the subject of the protection of 

 Alpine plants from extinction, and on the sins, or alleged sins, 

 of Alpine plant-hunters. I have quite got over that sense of 

 guilt in collecting Alpine plants which divers people, good, bad 

 and indifferent, endeavoured to instil into me, more or less suc- 

 cessfully, in my green horticultural youth. I have done so by 

 taking a course which may be recommended in other matters 

 than those of plant-collecting, namely, make up your mind by all 

 methods open to you what it is wrong to do, and don't do it ; 

 but also make up your mind what you may rightfully do, and do 



