We noticed this plant in many parts of
the Pyrenees, but here especially.
From the end of the road I started with a guide for the promised
garden of the Val d'Esquierry. By the side of the steep and winding
path I noticed Ramondia pyrenaica--the only place I saw it in the
Luchon district. Other notable plants were a quantity of Anemone
alpina of dwarf growth and very large flowers, covering a green knoll
near a stream. A little beyond, Aster alpinus was in flower, of a
bright color, which I can never get it to show in gardens. These, with
the exception of a few saxifrages and daffodils of the variety
muticus, were about the last flowers I saw there.
[Illustration: GROUP OF ALPINE FLOWERS]
Promise of flowers there was in abundance. Aconites, I suppose
napellus, and also that form of A. lycoctonum with the large leaves
known as pyrenaicum, were just enough grown to recognize. The large
white Asphodel, called by French botanists A. albus, but better known
in gardens as A. ramosus, which grows everywhere in the Pyrenees, and
the coarse shoots of Gentiana lutea were just showing.
Further on the daffodils were only just putting their noses through
the yellow dead grass, which the snow had hardly left and was again
beginning to whiten, for the rain, which had been coming down in
torrents ever since I left the carriage and had wet me through, had
now changed to snow.
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