The landlord of our hotel was quite enthusiastic in his description of the treat in store for me, enumerating a long catalogue of colors, and indicating with his hand, palm downward, the height from the ground at which I was to expect to see each color. I was afterward told that he had never been to the famous valley, being by no means addicted to climbing mountains.
During the first part of the drive from Luchon we saw hanging from the rocks by the roadside large masses of Saponaria ocymoides, varying much in the shade of color of the flowers. This is a plant which I find it better to grow from cuttings than from seed. The best shades of color are in this way preserved, and the plants are more flowery and less straggling. As we got near the end of the carriage road, the meadows became more crowded with flowers known in England only in gardens.
Besides such plants as Geranium pyrenaicum growing everywhere on the banks, the fields were full of a light purple geranium—I think sylvaticum. Here, too, I noticed Meconopsis cambrica with orange flowers. Narcissus poeticus was also there, and so were some splendid thistles, large and rich in color. But the most remarkable part of the coloring in the meadows was produced by different shades of Viola cornuta carpeting the ground. 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.
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. Still I went on, in spite of the bitter cold, hoping that I should come to some hyperborean region where the flowers would be all bright; but my guide at last undeceived me, and convinced me that we were far too early, so we went down again, wiser and sadder, and I advise my friends who wish to see the Val d'Esquierry in its beauty not to visit it before July at the earliest.
I have still one mountain walk to describe, a far more successful one, but it must be deferred till another week.—C. Wolley Dod, in the Garden.
Turtle shells may be softened by hot water, and if compressed in this state by screws in iron or brass moulds, may be bent into any shape, the moulds being then plunged into cold water.