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Although the season was getting late, I found the valley below Entraygues very rich in flowers. Agrimony, mint, and marjoram, with a tall inula, and the pretty, sweet-scented white melilot, were in great abundance along the bank. Upon the rocks, which now bordered the road, were the deep red blossoms of the orpine sedum, and a small crimson-flowered stock with very hoary stem.
STONE CROP. SEDUM rupestre. ROCK GINGER. All the species of Sedums are very ornamental plants, and are useful for covering rocks or walls, where they will generally grow with little trouble.
Thus almost every variety of flowers is represented in this brilliant natural garden orchids, cruciferæ, leguminæ, rosaceæ, caryophyllæ, lilies of various kinds, saxifrages, anemones, ranunculuses, swertia, primula, varieties of the sedum, some of which are peculiar to this mountain, and are elsewhere unknown.
But its thick epidermis effectually saves it from withering; and as soon as rain falls, wee white rootlets sprout out from the under side of the fragment as it lies, and it grows before long into a fresh small sedum plant. Thus, what seem like destructive agencies themselves, are turned in the end by mere tenacity of life into a secondary means of propagation.
Small rushes, grasses, and sedges formed the remaining vegetation, amongst which were the withered stalks of gentians, Sedum, Arenaria, Silene, and many Composite plants. At a little below 15,000 feet, we reached enormous flat beds of snow, which were said to be perpetual, but covered deeply with the October fall.
The path entered the forest which covers the steep sides of the ever-winding gorge of the Dordogne for many leagues, only broken where the rocks are so nearly vertical that no soil has ever formed upon them, except in the little crevices and upon the ledges, where the hellebore, the sedum, the broom, and other unambitious plants which love sterility flourish where the foot of man has never trod.
The cockscomb is the most widely known, but many white or double flowered varieties were already cultivated at that time. The striped Jalappa, the crested Sedum, the fasciated crown-imperial, white strawberries, red gooseberries and many others were known to Munting.
And it is a still more solemn thought to him, that it was not always so; that aeons and ages back, that rock which he passed a thousand feet below was fringed, not as now with fern and blue bugle, and white bramble-flowers, but perhaps with the alp- rose and the "gemsen-kraut" of Mont Blanc, at least with Alpine Saxifrages which have now retreated a thousand feet up the mountain side, and with the blue Snow-Gentian, and the Canadian Sedum, which have all but vanished out of the British Isles.
Our two species of native orpine, SEDUM TERNATUM and S. TELEPHIOIDES, are never troublesome as weeds.
As we rush hither and thither to gather them if we can their roots are veritable tentaculae, other lovely flowers are to be had in plenty, the beautiful deep-blue Pyrenean gentian, monk's-hood in rich purple blossom, rose-coloured antirrhinum, an exquisite little yellow sedum, with rare ferns.
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