6 
The Natm^alist in La Plata. 
uniform everlasting verdure. There are patches, 
sometimes large areas, where it does not grow, and 
these are carpeted by small creeping herbs of a 
livelier green, and are gay in spring with flowers, 
chiefly of the composite and papilionaceous kinds ; 
and verbenas, scarlet, purple, rose, and white. On 
moist or marshy grounds there are also several 
lilies, yellow, white, and red, two or three flags, and 
various other small flowers ; but altogether the 
flora of the pampas is the poorest in species of any 
fertile district on the globe. On moist clayey 
ground flourishes the stately pampa grass, Gynerium 
argenteum, the spears of which often attain a height 
of eight or nine feet. I have ridden through many 
leagues of this grass with the feathery spikes high 
as my head, and often higher. It would be im- 
possible for me to give anything like an adequate 
idea of the exquisite loveliness, at certain times and 
seasons, of this queen of grasses, the chief glory of 
the solitary pampa. Everyone is familiar with it in 
cultivation ; but the garden-plant has a sadly 
decaying, draggled look at all times, and to my 
mind, is often positively ugly with its dense wither- 
ing mass of coarse leaves, drooping on the ground, 
and bundle of spikes, always of the sarne dead 
white or dirty cream -colour. Now colour — the 
various ethereal tints that give a blush to its cloud- 
like purity — is one of the chief beauties of this 
grass on its native soil ; and travellers who have 
galloped across the pampas at a season of the year 
when the spikes are dead, and white as paper or 
parchment, have certainly missed its greatest charm. 
The plant is social^ and in some places where 
