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  THE FLOWER-FIELDS OF
  ALPINE SWITZERLAND


[Illustration: _CALTHA PALUSTRIS_ and _PRIMULA FARINOSA_ on the upper
fields of Champex towards the end of May. ]


                         THE FLOWER-FIELDS OF
                          ALPINE SWITZERLAND

                      AN APPRECIATION AND A PLEA


                         PAINTED AND WRITTEN

                                  BY

                             G. FLEMWELL

                AUTHOR OF “ALPINE FLOWERS AND GARDENS”


   “Into the fieldes did he goe, which then faire _Flora_ bedecked,
        With redolent blossoms, O how grateful to the sences.”
                                        FRANCIS SABIE, _Pan’s Pipe_.


                    WITH TWENTY-SIX REPRODUCTIONS
                       OF WATER-COLOUR DRAWINGS


                     London  ::  HUTCHINSON & CO.
                  Paternoster Row  ::  ::  ::  1911




                                  TO

                      MADEMOISELLE MARTHE DEDIE

                              AND ALL AT

                       “LA COMBE,” ROLLE (VAUD)




PREFACE


Last year Mr. G. Flemwell gave us a very beautiful volume upon the
Alpine Flora, and it has met with well-deserved success. But the
author is not yet satisfied. He thinks to do better, and would now
make known other pictures—those of Alpine fields, especially during
the spring months.

Springtime in our Alps is certainly the most beautiful moment of
the year, and the months of May and June, even to the middle of
July, are the most brilliant of all. It is a season which, up to
the present, we have rather considered as reserved for us Swiss,
who do not much like that which is somewhat irreverently called
_l’industrie des étrangers_, and perhaps we shall not be altogether
enchanted to find that the author _à la mode_ is about to draw the
veil from our secrets, open the lock-gates of our most sacred joys
to the international flood, and sound the clarion to make known,
_urbe et orbi_, the springtime glory of our fields. With this one
little reservation to calm the egotistical anxiety which is in me (Mr.
Flemwell, who is my colleague in the Swiss Alpine Club, knows too well
our national character not to understand the spirit in which we make
certain reservations with regard to this invasion of our mountains by
the cosmopolitan crowd), I wish to thank the author, and to compliment
him upon this fresh monument which he raises to the glory of our
flowers.

He here presents them under a different aspect, and shows us the
Alpine field, the meadow, the great green <DW72> as they transform
themselves in springtime. He sings of this rebirth with his poet-soul,
and presents it in pictures which are so many hymns to the glory of
the Creator. And he is justified in this, for nothing in the world
is more marvellous than the re-flowering of Alpine fields in May
and June. I have seen it in the little _vallons_ of Fully and of
Tourtemagne in Valais, in the fields of Anzeindaz and of Taveyannaz
(Canton de Vaud), at the summit of the Gemmi and on the Oberalp in
the Grisons; I have seen the flowering spring in the Bernese Oberland
and on the Utli (Zurich), in the _vallons_ of Savoie and in those
of Dauphiné; I have seen the metamorphosis of the Val de Bagnes and
of the Bavarian plain, the transformation of the marvellous valleys
of Piémont and of the elevated valley of Aosta. But I have never
seen anything more beautiful or more solemn than spring in the Jura
Mountains of Vaud and Neuchatel, with their fields of _Anemone alpina_
and _narcissiflora_, when immense areas disappeared under a deep azure
veil of _Gentiana verna_ or of the darker _Gentiana Clusii_, and
when the landscape is animated by myriads of _Viola biflora_ or of
Soldanella. In reading what Mr. Flemwell has written, my spirit floats
further afield even than this—to the Val del Faene, which reposes near
to the Bernina, and I see over again a picture that no painter, not
even our author, could render: the snow, in retiring to the heights,
gave place to a carpet of violet, blue, lilac, yellow, or bright pink,
according as it was composed of either _Soldanella pusilla_, of long,
narrow, pendent bells, which flowered in thousands and millions upon
<DW72>s still brown from the rigours of winter, or _Gentiana verna_,
or _Primula integrifolia_, whose dense masses were covered with
their lovely blossoms, or _Gagea Liotardi_, whose brilliant yellow
stars shone on all sides in the sun, or _Primula hirsuta_. All these
separate masses formed together a truly enchanting picture, which
remained unadmired by strangers—since these had not yet arrived—and
which I was happy and proud to salute under the sky of the Grisons.

Our author seems to have a predilection for the blue flower of
_Gentiana verna_, and I thank him for all he says of my favourite.
When, at the age of ten years, I saw it for the first time, carpeting
the fields of the Jura in Vaud, my child’s soul was so enthusiastic
over it that there were fears I should make myself ill. This
impression, which dates from 1864, is still as fresh in my memory as
if it were of yesterday. Blue, true blue, is so rare in Nature that
Alphonse Karr could cite but five or six flowers that were really so:
the Gentian, the Comellina, several Delphiniums, the Cornflower, and
the Forget-me-not. The blue of the Gentian is certainly the most
superb and velvety, especially that of _Gentiana bavarica_. A group
of _Gentiana verna_, _brachyphylla_, and _bavarica_ which I exhibited
at the Temple Show in London in May 1910, and which was a very modest
one, it having suffered during the long voyage from Floraire to
London, was greatly admired, and did not cease to attract the regard
of all flower-lovers. Blue is so scarce, every one said, that it is
good to feast one’s eyes upon it when one meets with it!

The practical side of this volume resides in the information it
offers to lovers of Alpine flowers in England. One readily believes
that, in order to cultivate these mountain plants, big surroundings
are necessary: a great collection of rocks, as in the giant Alpine
garden of Friar Park. We have proved in our garden of Floraire—where
the public is willingly admitted, and which flower-lovers are invited
to visit—that mountain plants can be cultivated without rockwork,
and that it is even important, if one wishes to give an artistic and
natural aspect to the garden, not to be too prodigal of rock and
stone. Much verdure is essential, it is necessary to have a frame
for the picture, and that frame can only be obtained by creating the
Alpine field. One day at Friar Park, Sir Frank Crisp, the creator
of this beautiful _alpinum_, taking me aside and making me walk
around with him, showed me a vast, empty field which stretched away
to the north of the Matterhorn, and said: “It is here that I wish
to establish a Swiss field to soften the too rocky aspect of the
garden and to give it a fitting frame.” And since then I am unable to
conceive that there was ever a time when the Alpine garden at Friar
Park had not its setting of Alpine fields. There was no idea of making
such a thing when the garden was begun; but once the rockwork was
finished the rest imposed itself. One needs the flower-filled field,
_l’alpe en fête_, by the side of the grey rocks.

This is why, in our horticultural establishment at Floraire, we make
constant efforts to reproduce expanses of Narcissi, Columbines,
Gentians, Daphnes, Primulas, etc., grouped in masses as we have seen
them in nature, and as Mr. Flemwell gives them in his book.

Herein lies the great utility of this volume, and the reason why it
will be consulted with pleasure by gardeners as well as by alpinists
and lovers of nature generally.

                                        HENRY CORREVON.

  FLORAIRE, NEAR GENEVA,
  _January 2, 1911_.




CONTENTS


  PART I

  _AN APPRECIATION_


  CHAPTER                                       PAGE

     I. OF OUR ENTHUSIASM FOR “ALPINES”            3

    II. ALPINE FLOWER-FIELDS                      12

   III. THE MAY FIELDS                            21

    IV. THE VERNAL GENTIAN                        35

     V. IN STORM AND SHINE                        48

    VI. THE JUNE MEADOWS                          64

   VII. ON FLORAL ATTRACTIVENESS AND COLOUR       86

  VIII. THE RHODODENDRON                         102

    IX. THE JULY FIELDS                          114

     X. THE AUTUMN CROCUS                        134


  PART II

  _A PLEA_


   XI. ALPINE FIELDS FOR ENGLAND                 149

  XII. SOME WAYS AND MEANS                       162

       L’ENVOI                                   179

  INDEX                                          189




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


  1.  _Caltha palustris_ and _Primula farinosa_ on the
      upper fields of Champex towards the end of May     _Frontispiece_

                                                                   PAGE

  2. _Gentiana verna_ and _Primula farinosa_ on the lower fields of
     Champex towards the end of May, with part of the _massif_
     of Saleinaz in the background                                    2

  3. Lac Champex in cloudland at the end of May; _Caltha palustris_
     and _Primula farinosa_ by the water-edge                         8

  4. The upper fields of Champex early in June, with the Grand
     Combin in the distance                                          13

  5. _Trollius europæus_, the Globe Flower, on the cloud-swept
     fields in early June                                            17

  6. _Anemone sulphurea_ and _Viola calcarata_ in the Val d’Arpette
     in June                                                         25

  7. Early-June fields beyond Praz de Fort in the Val Ferret,
     backed by the Groupe du Grand Saint-Bernard et du Grand
     Golliaz                                                         32

  8. The Paradise Lily (_Paradisia Liliastrum_) near the Glacier de
     Trient about the middle of June                                 40

  9. June meadows of Salvia, Lychnis, etc., in the Val Ferret,
     just before arriving at the village of Praz de Fort             48

  10. Field of _Campanula rhomboidalis_ on the Col de la Forclaz
      about the beginning of July                                    57

  11. In the early-July fields at Champex                            65

  12. Evening among the fields of pink Bistort at Lac Champex;
      sunset-glow on the Grand Combin, July                          73

  13. Haymaking at Champex in the middle of July                     81

  14. The Autumn Crocus in the fields near the village of Trient,
      with the Aiguille du Tour in the background, September         88

  15. _Anemone sulphurea_ and _Gentiana excisa_ painted directly in
      the fields at the end of May                                   97

  16. _Primula farinosa_, _Gentiana verna_, Micheli’s Daisy,
      _Bartsia alpina_, _Polygala alpina_, and the two Pinguiculas
      or Butterworts, painted directly in the fields at the end
      of May                                                        105

  17. _Gentiana verna_, the type-plant, and some of its forms       113

  18. _Geranium sylvaticum_, _Potentilla rupestris_, _Centaurea
      montana_, the pink Bistort, the little Alpine Bistort,
      painted on the spot in the fields at the beginning of July    122

  19. _Paradisia Liliastrum_, the Paradise or St. Bruno’s Lily      129

  20. _Rosa alpina_, the thornless Alpine Eglantine                 136

  21. Young plants of _Veratrum album_, together with _Salvia
      pratensis_, _Phyteuma betonicæfolium_, _P. orbiculare_,
      the white and the yellow Euphrasia, and the yellow Clover,
      drawn on the spot at the beginning of July                    144

  22. Arnica, the Brown Gentian (_G. purpurea_), _Campanula
      barbata_, and the fiery little _Hieracium aurantiacum_,
      painted from life in the fields towards the middle of July    152

  23. The tall yellow _Hypochœris uniflora_, _Centaurea uniflora_,
      the Golden Hawkweed (_Crepis aurea_) drawn from life in the
      July fields                                                   160

  24. _Gentiana campestris_ and _Gentiana bavarica_                 169

  25. _Astrantia major_, _A. minor_, and the Apollo butterfly       176

  26. The Willow Gentian (_G. asclepiadea_) and the Alpine Cotton
  Grass (_Eriophorum Scheuchzeri_)                                  182




PART I

_AN APPRECIATION_

    “Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.”

  ANDREW MARVELL.


[Illustration: _GENTIANA VERNA_ and _PRIMULA FARINOSA_ on the lower
fields of Champex towards the end of May, with part of the _MASSIF_ of
Saleinaz in the background. ]




CHAPTER I

OF OUR ENTHUSIASM FOR “ALPINES”

     “We are here dealing with one of the strongest intellectual
     impulses of rational beings. Animals, as a rule, trouble
     themselves but little about anything unless they want either
     to eat it or to run away from it. Interest in, and wonder at,
     the works of nature and of the doings of man are products of
     civilisation, and excite emotions which do not diminish, but
     increase with increasing knowledge and cultivation. Feed them and
     they grow; minister to them and they will greatly multiply.”—THE
     RT. HON. A. J. BALFOUR, _in his Address as Lord Rector of St.
     Andrews University, December 10, 1887_.


Some excuse—or rather, some explanation—seems to be needed for daring
to present yet another book upon the Alpine Flora of Switzerland. So
formidable is the array of such books already, and so persistently do
additions appear, that it is not without diffidence that I venture
to swell the numbers, and, incidentally, help to fill the new
subterranean chamber of the Bodleian.

With the author of “Du Vrai, Du Beau, et Du Bien,” I feel that “Moins
la musique fait de bruit et plus elle touche”; I feel that reticence
rather than garrulity is at the base of well-being, and that, if the
best interests of the cult of Alpines be studied, any over-production
of books upon the subject should be avoided, otherwise we are likely
to be face to face with the danger of driving this particular section
of the plant-world within that zone of appreciation “over which hangs
the veil of familiarity.”

Few acts are more injudicious, more unkind, or more destructive than
that of overloading. “The last straw” will break the back of anything,
not alone of a camel. One who is mindful of this truth is in an
anxious position when he finds himself one of a thousand industrious
builders busily bent upon adding straw upon straw to the back of one
special subject.

It were a thousand pities if, for want of moderation, Alpines should
go the way Sweet Peas are possibly doomed to go—the way of all
overridden enthusiasms. Extravagant attention is no new menace to
the welfare of that we set out to admire and to cherish, and it were
pity of pities if, for lack of seemly restraint, the shy and lovely
denizens of the Alps should arrive at that place in our intimacy where
they will no longer be generally regarded with thoughtful respect and
intelligent wonder, but will be obliged to retire into the oblivion
which so much surrounds those things immediately and continuously
under our noses. For, of all plants, they merit to be of our abiding
treasures.

But just because we have come to the opinion that Alpines stand in
need of less “bush,” it does not necessarily follow that we must be
sparing of our attention. There is ample occasion for an extension
of honest, balanced intimacy. What we have to fear is an irrational
freak-enthusiasm similar to the seventeenth-century craze for Tulips—a
craze of which La Bruyère so trenchantly speaks in referring to an
acquaintance who was swept off his feet by the monstrous prevailing
wave. “God and Nature,” he says, “are not in his thoughts, for they
do not go beyond the bulb of his tulip, which he would not sell for a
thousand pounds, though he will give it you for nothing when tulips
are no longer in fashion, and carnations are all the rage. This
rational being, who has a soul and professes some religion, comes home
tired and half starved, but very pleased with his day’s work. He has
seen some tulips.” Now this was enthusiasm of a degree and kind which
could not possibly endure; reaction was bound to come. Of course, it
was an extreme instance of fashion run mad, and one of which Alpines
may never perhaps provoke a repetition. Yet we shall do well to see a
warning in it.

I think I hear enthusiastic lovers of Alpines protesting that there is
no fear whatever of such an eventuality for their gems, because these
latter are above all praises and attentions and cannot be overrated.
I fancy I hear the enthusiasts explaining that Alpines are not Sweet
Peas, or Tulips, or double Show Dahlias; that they occupy a place
apart, a place such as is occupied by the hot-house and greenhouse
Orchids, a place unique and unassailable. And these protestations may
quite possibly prove correct; I only say that, in view of precedents,
there lurks a tendency towards the danger named, and that it therefore
behoves all those who have the solid welfare of these plants at heart
to be on their guard, to discourage mere empty attentions, and to
do what is possible to direct enthusiasm into sound, intelligent
channels. “An ignorant worship is a poor substitute for a just
appreciation.” Aye, but it is often more than this; it is often a
dangerous one.

Already the admiration and attention meted out to Alpines is being
spoken of as a fashion, a rage, and a craze; and we know that there
is no smoke without fire. Certainly, the same language has been used
towards the enthusiasm shown for Orchids. But Orchids have nought
to fear from that degree of popularisation which impinges upon
vulgarisation. The prices they command and the expense attendant upon
their culture afford them important protection—a protection which
Alpines do not possess to anything like the same extent.

Of course, the fate in store for Alpines in England is not of so
inevitable a nature as that awaiting Japanese gardening; for in
this latter “craze” there is an element scarcely present in Alpine
gardening. We can more or less fathom the spirit of Alpine gardening
and are therefore quite able to construct something that shall be more
or less intelligent and true; but can we say as much for ourselves
with regard to Japanese gardening? I think not. I think that largely
it is, and must remain, a sealed book to us. Japanese gardening, as
Miss Du Cane very truly points out in her Preface to “The Flowers and
Gardens of Japan,” is “the most complicated form of gardening in the
world.” Who in England will master the “seven schools” and absorb all
the philosophy and subtle doctrine which governs them? Who in England
will bring himself to see a rock, a pool, a bush as the Japanese
gardener sees them, as, indeed, the Japanese people in general see
them? The spirit of Japanese gardening is as fundamentally different
from the spirit of English gardening as that of Japanese art is from
English art. What poor, spiritless results we have when English art
assumes the guise of Japanese art! It is imitation limping leagues
behind its model. And it is this because it is unthought, unfelt,
unrealized.

Strikingly individual, the Japanese outlook is much more impersonal
than is ours. Needs must that we be born into the traditions of such a
race to comprehend and feel as it does about Nature. A Japanese must
have his rocks, streams, trees proportioned to his tea or dwelling
house and bearing mystic religious significance. Such particular
strictness is the product of ages of upbringing. A few years, a
generation or two could not produce in us the reasoned nicety of this
phase of appreciation; still less the reading of some book or the
visit to some garden built by Japanese hands. The spirit of a race is
of far longer weaving; one summer does not make a butterfly;

[Illustration: LAC CHAMPEX in cloudland at the end of May; _CALTHA
PALUSTRIS_ and _PRIMULA FARINOSA_ by the water edge. ]

                          “... think of all
    The suns that go to make one speedwell blue.”

To us a tiny chalet is quite well placed amid stupendous cliffs and
huge, tumbled boulders, and is fit example to follow, if only we
are able to do so. In Alpine gardening we feel no need to study the
size of our rocks in relation to our summer-house, or place them so
that they express some high philosophic or mystic principle. We have
no cult beyond Nature’s own cult in this matter. We see, and we are
content to see, that Nature has no nice plan and yet is invariably
admirable; we see, and we are content to see, that if man, as in
Switzerland, chooses to plant his insignificant dwelling in the midst
of great, disorderly rocks and crowded acres of brilliant blossoms, it
is romantic garden enough and worthy of as close imitation as possible.

With the Japanese, gardening is perhaps more a deeply æsthetic culture
than it is the culture of plants. Where we are bald, unemotional,
“scientific” gardeners, they will soar high into the clouds of
philosophic mysticism. Truer children of the Cosmos than we Western
materialists, they walk in their gardens as in some religious rite.
We, too, no doubt, are often dreamers; we, too, are often wont to
find in our gardens expression for our searching inner-consciousness;
but how different are our methods, how different the spirit we wish to
express.

The most, therefore, we can accomplish in Japanese modes of gardening
is to ape them; and of this, because of its emptiness, we shall very
soon tire. The things which are most enduring are the things honestly
felt and thought; for the expression of the true self reaches out
nearest to satisfaction. Unless, then, we are apes in more than
ancestry, Japanese gardening can have no long life among us. Alpine
gardening is far more akin to our natural or hereditary instincts;
it holds for us the possibility of an easier and more honest
appreciation. And it is just here, in this very fact, where lies much
of the danger which may overtake and smother the immense and growing
enthusiasm with which Alpines are meeting.

       *       *       *       *       *

How best, then, to direct and build up this enthusiasm into something
substantial, something that shall secure for Alpines a lasting place
in our affections? The answer is in another question: What better than
a larger, more comprehensive appeal to Alpine nature; what better than
a more thorough translation of Alpine circumstance to our grounds and
gardens?

Now, to this end we must look around us in the Alps to find that
element in plant-life which we have hitherto neglected; and if we
do this, our eyes must undoubtedly alight upon the fields. Hitherto
these have been a greatly neglected quantity with us when planning
our Alpine gardens, and their possibilities have been almost
entirely overlooked in respect of our home-lands. Why should we not
make more pronounced attempts to create such meadows, either as
befitting adjuncts to our rock works or as embellishments to our
parks? I venture to think that such an extension and direction of our
enthusiasm would add much sterling popularity to that already acquired
by Alpines in our midst, besides doing far greater justice to many
of their number. I venture to think, also, that it would add much to
the joy and health of home-life. These thoughts, therefore, shall be
developed and examined as we push forward with this volume, first of
all making a careful study of the fields on the spot, and marking
their “moods and tenses.”




CHAPTER II

ALPINE FLOWER-FIELDS

     “If you go to the open field, you shall always be in contact
     directly with the Nature. You hear how sweetly those innocent
     birds are singing. You see how beautifully those meadow-flowers
     are blossoming.... Everything you are observing there is pure and
     sacred. And you yourselves are unconsciously converted into purity
     by the Nature.”—YOSHIO MARKINO, _My Idealed John Bulless_.


Alpine Flower-fields; it is well that we should at once come to some
understanding as to the term “Alpine” and what it is here intended to
convey, otherwise it will be open to misinterpretation. Purists in
the use of words will be nearer to our present meaning than they who
have in mind the modern and general acceptation of the words “Alp” and
“Alpine.” The authority of custom has confirmed these words in what,
really, is faulty usage. “Alp” really means a mountain pasturage, and
its original use, traceable for more than a thousand years, relates to
any part of a mountain where the cattle can graze. It does not
mean merely the snow-clad summit of some important mountain. Nor does
“Alpine” mean that region of a mountain which is above the tree-limit.

[Illustration: The UPPER FIELDS of Champex early in June, with the
Grand Combin in the distance. ]

Strictly, then, Alpine circumstance is circumstance surrounding the
mountain pasturages, whether these latter be known popularly as
Alpine or as sub-Alpine. To the popular mind—to-day to a great extent
amongst even the Swiss themselves—Alpine heights at once suggest
what Mr. E. F. Benson calls “white altitudes”; but that should not
be the suggestion conveyed here. For present purposes it should be
clearly understood that the term “Alpine pastures” is used in its
old, embracive sense, and that sub-Alpine pastures are included and,
indeed, predominate.

Of course, we may be obliged to bow occasionally to a custom that
has so obliterated original meanings, or we shall risk becoming
unintelligible; we may from time to time be obliged to use the word
“sub-Alpine” for the lower sphere in Alpine circumstance (although,
really and truly, the word should suggest circumstance removed from
off the Alps—circumstance purely and simply of the plains). We shall
therefore do well to accept the definition of “sub-Alpine” given
by Dr. Percy Groom in the “General Introduction to Ball’s Alpine
Guide,”—“the region of coniferous trees.” Yet, at the same time, it
must be clearly understood that our use of the term “Alpine” embraces
this sub-Alpine region.

It is absolutely necessary to start with this understanding, because,
in talking here—or, for that matter, anywhere—of Alpine plants we
shall be talking much of sub-Alpine plants. After all, our own gardens
warrant this. Our Alpine rockeries are, in point of fact, very largely
sub-Alpine with regard to the plants which find a place upon them. As
laid down in the present writer’s “Alpine Flowers and Gardens,” it is
difficult, if not impossible, to draw any definite line, even for the
strictest of Alpine rock-gardening, between Alpines and sub-Alpines.
The list would indeed be shorn and abbreviated which would exclude
all subjects not found solely above the pine-limit. A ban would have
to be placed upon the best of the Gentians, the two Astrantias, the
Paradise and the Martagon Lily, to mention nothing of Campanulas,
Pinks, Geraniums, Phyteumas, Saxifrages, Hieraciums, and a whole host
of other precious and distinctive blossoms. It would never do; our
rockworks would be robbed of their best and brightest. Therefore,
because there is much that is Alpine in sub-Alpine vegetation (just as
there is much that is sub-Alpine in Alpine vegetation) we must, at any
rate for the purposes of this volume, adhere to the etymology of the
word “Alpine,” and give the name without a murmur to the middle and
lower mountain-fields, in precisely the same spirit in which we give
the name to our mixed rockworks in England.

No need for us to travel higher than from 4,000 to 5,000 feet (and
we may reasonably descend to some 3,000 or 2,500 feet). No need
whatever to scramble to the high summer pastures on peak and col
(6,000 to 7,000 feet), where abound “Ye living flowers that skirt the
eternal frost”; where, around a pile of stones or _signal_, solitary
Swallow-tail butterflies love to disport themselves; where the sturdy
cowherd invokes in song his patron-saint, St. Wendelin; and where the
pensive cattle browse and chew the cud for a brief and ideal spell. No
need to seek, for instance, the rapid pastures around the summit of
Mount Cray, or on the steep col between the Gummfluh and the Rubly,
if we are at Château d’Oex; or to toil to the Col de Balme or to the
“look-out” on the Arpille, if we are at the Col de la Forclaz; or
to scale the Pas d’Encel or the Col de Coux, if we are at Champéry;
or to clamber to the Croix de Javernaz, if we are at Les Plans; or
to follow the hot way up to the Col de la Gueulaz, if we are at
Finhaut; or to take train to the grazing-grounds on the summit of the
Rochers de Naye, if we are at Caux or at Les Avants. We shall find
all we desire—as at Randa, Zermatt, Binn, Bérisal, or Evolena—within
a saunter of the hotels. Such fields as are above are, for the far
greater part, used solely for grazing, and we must stay where most are
reserved for hay. Here we shall find the particular flora we require,
and shall be able to study it without let or hindrance from “the tooth
of the goat” and cow. The only hindrance will be when those strict
utilitarians, the haymakers, appear and change our colour-full Eden
into a green and park-like domain, with here and there a neglected
corner to remind us of what a rich prospect was ours—

    “Till the shining scythes went far and wide
    And cut it down to dry.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Thus, we are to remain in a region comfortably accessible to the
average easy-going visitor to the Alps—the region in which so
well-found a place as Lac Champex is situated.

[Illustration: _TROLLIUS EUROPÆUS_, the Globe Flower, on the
cloud-swept fields in early June. ]

And what a wondrous region it is, this which is of sufficient altitude
for Nature to be thrown right out of what, in the plains, is her
normal habit; where the Cherry-tree, if planted, blooms only about the
middle of June; where the Eglantine is in full splendour in the middle
of July and can be gathered well into August; where the blackbird is
still piping at the end of July; where the wild Laburnum is in blossom
in August; and where quantities of ripe fruit of the wild Currant,
Raspberry, and Strawberry may be picked in September.

And Champex, too, what a favoured and beautiful place! I have chosen
this particular spot as the “base of operations,” because of its
variety in physical aspect, and, consequently, its variety in flowers.
This plan I have deemed of more use than to wander from place to
place, and I think that, on the whole, it will be fair to the Swiss
Alpine field-flora. We can take note from time to time of what is not
to be found here; for, of course, Champex does not possess all the
varieties of Alpine field-flowers. _Lilium croceum_, _Anemone alpina_,
_Narcissus poeticus_, and the Daffodil are, for instance, notable
absentees. The soil is granitic rather than calcareous. Yet, taking
all in all, the flora is wonderfully representative; and it certainly
is exceptionally rich.

Situated upon what is really a broad, roomy col between the Catogne
and that extreme western portion of the Mont Blanc _massif_ containing
the Aiguille du Tour and the Pointe d’Orny, Champex, with its
sparkling lake and cluster of hotels and châlets, dominates to the
south the valleys of Ferret and Entremont, and to the north the
valley of the Dranse, thus offering rich, well-watered pasture-<DW72>s
of varied aspect and capacity. Whether it be upon the undulating
pastures falling away to the Gorges du Durnand, or upon the steeper
fields leading down to Praz-de-Fort and Orsières, 1,000 and 2,000 feet
below; or whether it be upon the luxuriant, marshy meadows immediately
around the lake, or upon the slightly higher, juicy grass-land of the
wild and picturesque Val d’Arpette, there is an ever-changing and
gorgeous luxury of colour which must be seen to be believed. “The
world’s a-flower,” and a-flower without one single trace of sameness.
Whichever way we walk, whichever way we gaze, the eye meets with some
fresh combination of tints, some new and arresting congregation of
field-flowers.

It is too much, perhaps, to say of any place that it is

    “The only point where human bliss stands still,
    And tastes the good without the fall to ill.”

But if such eulogy ever were permissible it would be so of Champex and
her flower-strewn fields and <DW72>s in May and June and early in July.
In any case, we may unquestionably allow ourselves to quote further of
Pope’s lines and say that, amid these fields, if anywhere, we are able
to

    “Grasp the whole world of reason, life, and sense,
    In one close system of benevolence.”

Like Elizabeth of “German Garden” fame, we English love, and justly
love, our “world of dandelions and delights.” We find our meadows
transcend all others, and, in them—still like Elizabeth—we “forget
the very existence of everything but ... the glad blowing of the wind
across the joyous fields.” But in this pride there is room, I feel
sure, for welcome revelation. I can imagine few things that would more
increase delight in a person familiar only with English meadows than
to be suddenly set down among the fields of the Alps in either May,
or June, or early July. What would he, or she, then feel about “the
glad blowing of the wind across the joyous fields”? It would surely
entail a very lively state of ecstasy.

And if only we had at home these grass-lands of Champex! Such
hayfields in England would create a furore. Hourly excursions would
be run to where they might be found. Lovers of the beautiful would be
amazed, then overjoyed, and lost in admiration. Farmers, too, would
likewise be amazed—then look askance and rave about “bad farming.”
Undoubtedly there would be a war of interests. Upon which side would
be the greater righteousness, it is not easy to decide; but presently
we shall have occasion to look into the matter more closely. In the
meantime, no particular daring is required to predict that, if these
meadows came to our parks and gardens, they would come to stay.




CHAPTER III

THE MAY FIELDS

    “This is the hour, the day,
    The time, the season sweet.
    Quick! hasten, laggard feet,
    Brook not delay;

          •     •     •     •

    ... Maytide will not last;
    Forth, forth, while yet ’tis time, before the
                      Spring is past.”

                                LEWIS MORRIS, _Time to Rejoice_.


It is essential that we arrive amid the Alpine fields in May; for
we must watch them from the very beginning. To postpone our coming
until June would be to miss what is amongst the primest of Alpine
experiences: the awakening of the earlier gems in their shy yet
trustful legions. Indeed, in June in any ordinary year, we should
risk finding several lovely plants gone entirely out of bloom, except
perhaps quite sparsely in some belated snow-clogged corner; for, be
it remembered, we shall not be climbing higher than this region: we
do not propose to pursue Flora as she ascends to the topmost pasture.
As for following the very general rule and coming only in late July,
it is quite out of the question. We must come in May; and it should
be towards the middle of the month—although the exact date will, of
course, be governed by the advanced or retarded state of the season.
Speaking generally, however, the 15th is usually neither too early
nor too late. It is wiser to be a day or so too early than otherwise,
because at this altitude it is remarkable how soon Nature is wide
awake when once she has opened her eyes. The earliest floral effects
are of the most fleeting in the Alps; and, like most things fleeting
in this changeful world, they are of the most lovely. To some it may
appear laughable to say that one day is of vast importance; but it is
only the truth. Down on the plains things are positively sluggish by
comparison (though an artist, wishing to paint them at their best,
knows only too well how rapid even are these). As in Greenland, up
here, at 4,800 feet, vegetation adapts itself in all practical earnest
to the exigencies of shortened seasons. June’s glories are quick in
passing; so, alas, are July’s; but the glories of May, having usually
but a brief portion of the month in which to develop, pass, as it
were, at breathless speed.

Yes, if ever there is a nervous energy of nature, it is in May in
Alpine regions; and it behoves us to be equally quick and timely. For
instance, this year (1910) I was struck by the fact that, two weeks
after the last vestige of an avalanche had cleared from off a steep
<DW72> at the foot of the Breyaz, three or four cows belonging to the
hotels were grazing contentedly on rich green grass, and the Crocus
and Soldanella had already bloomed and disappeared.

When we quit the plains their face is well set towards June. Spring’s
early timidity and delicacy are past; the Primrose, Scilla, Hepatica,
Violet, and Wood-Anemone have retired into a diligent obscurity and
the fields are already gay with the Orchids and the Globe-Flower. But
up here at Champex we find ourselves back with the Crocus, springing
fresh and glistening from the brown, snow-soaked sward, and with the
as yet scarcely awakened Cowslip. As we climb up from Martigny the
<DW72>s grow more and more wintry-looking, and we may perhaps begin to
regret leaving the wealth of blushing apple-blossom which dominates
the azure-blue fields of Myosotis below the Gorges du Durnand. And
this regret will probably become more keen when we plunge into the
forests just below Champex and find them still choked with snow and
ice. But we are soon and amply repaid for what at first seems a mad
ostracism on our part. One or two brief days, full of intense interest
in watching Alpine nature’s unfolding, and all regrets have vanished,
and we have quite decided that these May fields are a Paradise
wherein, in Meredith’s words, “of all the world you might imagine gods
to sit.”

The Crocus is not for long alone in making effective display. The
Soldanella soon joins it after a few hours of warm sunshine; in
fact, in many favoured corners it is already out when we arrive.
And _Geum montanum_ is no laggard; neither are the two Gentians,
_verna_ and _excisa_, nor the yellow-and-white Box-leaved Polygala.
By the time the 20th of the month has come the pastures are thickly
sown with pristine loveliness, and by the 25th this is at the height
of perfection—a height to which nothing in paint or in ink can
attain. Flora has touched the fields with her fairy wand and they
have responded with amazing alacrity. Turn which way we will, the
landscape is suffused with the freshest of yellow, rose, and
blue; and broad, surprising acres of these bewitching hues lie at our
very door, coming, as it were,

    “In our winter’s heart to build a tower of song.”

[Illustration: _ANEMONE SULPHUREA_ and _VIOLA CALCARATA_ in the Val
d’Arpette in June. ]

Our “laundered bosoms” swell with hymns of praise; the plains have
receded into Memory’s darker recesses, and we vote these Alpine
meadows to a permanent and foremost place in our affections—so much
so, indeed, that, with Théophile Gautier, we unhesitatingly declare
(though not, be it said, with quite all the musical exaggeration of
his poet spirit):

    “Mais, moi, je les préfère aux champs gras et fertiles
    Qui sont si loin du ciel qu’on n’y voit jamais Dieu.”

We know, of course, Divinity is not absent on the plains. When the
poet says otherwise it is a tuneful licence with which we are merely
tolerant. We quite understand that there is a more moderate meaning
behind his extravagance. We know, and everybody acquainted with Alpine
circumstance knows, that in the Alps there is a very strong and
striking sense of the nearer presence of the Divine in nature. There
is a superior and indescribable purity, together with a refinement
and restraint which defies what is the utmost prodigality of colour;
and, much as we love the divinity of things in the plains, the
divinity of those of high altitudes must take a foremost position in
our esteem and joy.

Mr. A. F. Mummery has a fine passage touching this subject—a passage
that may well be quoted here, for it sums up in admirable fashion all
that we ourselves are feeling. “Every step,” he says, “is health,
fun, and frolic. The troubles and cares of life, together with the
essential vulgarity of a plutocratic society, are left far below—foul
miasmas that cling to the lowest bottoms of reeking valleys. Above,
in the clear air and searching sunlight, we are afoot with the quiet
gods, and men can know each other and themselves for what they are.”
“The quiet gods”—yes, indeed! Here, if anywhere, in May and June,
is quietness; here at this season these hosts of lovely flowers are
indeed “born to blush unseen” and, in Man’s arrogant phrase, to “waste
their sweetness on the desert air.”

But what nonsense it is, this assumption that the flowers are wasted
if not seen by us! It is not for that reason we should be here: it is
not because the flowers would benefit one iota by our presence. What
is it to them whether they have, or have not been seen by Man? “We
are what suns and winds and waters make us,” they say; and, in saying
thus, they speak but the substantial truth. Their history is one of
strenuous self-endeavour; their unique and dazzling loveliness they
have attained “alone,” oblivious of Man’s presence in the world. After
age-long effort, from which their remarkable happiness and beauty are
the primest distillations, Man stumbles upon them in their radiance,
declares they are languishing for want of his admiration, and at once
commiserates with them upon their lone and wasted lot. What fond
presumption! How typically human!

Is there not proof abundant of Nature’s “profuse indifference to
mankind?” Why, then, should Man assume that all things are made for
him? why, in his small, lordly way, should he say—as he is for ever
saying—“The sun, the moon, the stars, have their _raison d’être_ in
Me?” In a sense he is right, but not in the arrogant sense he so
much presumes. All things help to make him. The sun, moon, and stars
are for him, inasmuch as he would not be what he is—he would not,
probably, be Man—did they not exist. But neither, then, would the
black-beetle be as it is. Do not let him forget the high claims of the
black-beetle.

    “Man stands so large before the eyes of man
    He cannot think of Earth but as his own;
    All his philosophies can guess no plan
    That leaves _him_ not on his imagined throne.”

Let us be humble: let us merge ourselves modestly in the scheme of
things. It is not to cheer up the flowers in their “loneliness” that
we ought to be with them here in the spring. We ought to be here
because of all that the flowers and their loveliness can do for
_us_, in lifting us above “the essential vulgarity of a plutocratic
society,” and in revealing us to ourselves and to each other as rarely
we are revealed elsewhere. Here with these pastures are health and
vigour—vigour that is quiet and restful; here is unpretentiousness
more radiant, more glorious, than the most dazzling of pretensions.
Here, if we will, we can come and be natural—here, where Man, that
“feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances,” as Mr.
Bernard Shaw calls him, can be in the fullest sense a man, and be in
no wise ashamed of it. For here, in a word, is Nature—unaffected,
unconventional, unconscious of herself, yet in the highest degree
efficient. The purity of it all is wonderful. And it is this, with
its beneficent power, that _we_ waste.

If spring is reckoned pure below, among “the foul miasmas that cling
to the lowest bottoms of reeking valleys,” how much purer must it not
be reckoned under Alpine skies! The amelioration is already marked
after we have risen a few hundred feet from the plains. Our minds
climb with our bodies, both attuning themselves to the increasing
purity of our surroundings, until at some 5,000 feet we feel, to use
a homely expression, as different as chalk from cheese. And nothing
aids more potently in this attunement than do the fields of springtime
blossoms.

“Why bloom’st thou so?” asks the poet of these flowers—

        “Why bloom’st thou so
    In solitary loveliness, more fair
    In this thy artless beauty, than the rare
    And costliest garden-plant?”

The question has been answered, or, at any rate, answered in important
part, and far more truthfully than by any blind, patronising remark
about “wasted beauty.” Wasted! It is an accusation which the flowers
should hurl at us! Wasted? Yes; wasted, in so far as we do not yet
take advantage of the Alpine spring; wasted, in so far as we arrive
only in late July or early August!

Nor should our praise be counted amongst surprises. Champex’s fields
bear witness to it being no mere idle adulation. On the flat damp
grass-land, intersected by sparkling glacier streams, which stretches
away to the north of the lake, great and brilliant groups of _Caltha
palustris_ (only the common Marsh-Marigold, it is true, but of how
much more luscious, brilliant hue than down upon some lowland marsh)
lie upon a vast rosy carpet of _Primula farinosa_, effectively broken
here and there by the rich purple tints of _Bartsia alpina_ and the
ruddier hues of Pedicularis. And this wondrous wealth of yellow and
rose is found again on the extensive sunny <DW72>s to the south of
the lake; but here _Gentiana verna_ asserts its bright blue presence
amongst the Primula, and the effect is even more astonishingly
gay than it is to the north. Like Count Smorltorks “poltics,” it
“surprises by himself.”

On these southern <DW72>s, too, are quantities of Micheli’s Daisy,
enlivening still more with their glistening whiteness the beautiful
colour-scheme. There are also colonies of the two Pinguiculas, mauve
and creamy-white; also of the quaint Alpine Crowfoot and of the
yet more quaint, æsthetically tinted _Ajuga pyramidalis_—the most
arresting of the Bugles—and of the demure little Alpine Polygala,
varying from blue (the type) through mauve to reddish-pink, even to
white. Here, also, is the Sulphur Anemone just unfolding the earliest
of its clear citron- blossoms. But to see this Anemone to
fullest advantage we must turn to the drier pastures to the east
and north of the lake, where it is scattered in endless thousands
amongst sheets of _Gentiana verna_ and _excisa_ and a profusion of the
yellow Pedicularis (_tuberosa_), the white Potentilla (_rupestris_),
the golden Geum (_montanum_), the purple Calamintha (_alpina_),
the canary-yellow Biscutella (_lævigata_), the rosy-red Saponaria
(_ocymoides_), and many another of the earlier pasture-flowers. And
by the side of all this ravishing young life and colour are the still
remaining avalanches of piled-up frozen snow—grim reminders of what
wild riot winter makes upon these pastures whilst the flowers are
sleeping.

Surely, then our praise is not surprising? Surely, nowhere in the
Alps in May shall we find anything more admirable or more amazingly
colour-full than are these pasture-<DW72>s and meadows of Lac Champex?
In some one or other respect their equal may be found in many favoured
places; in many spots we shall find most astonishing displays of other
kinds of plants than we have here—of, for instance, the white _Anemone
alpina_ and the purple _Viola calcarata_, as on the <DW72>s of the
Chamossaire above Villars-sur-Ollon (though the Viola is in quantity
near Champex, in the Val d’Arpette, in June), or of the Pheasant-eye
Narcissus, as at Les Avants and Château d’Oex, and the Daffodil, as
at Champéry and Saas; but, taking Champex’s floral wealth as a whole,
it can have few, if any superiors in point of abundance and colour at
this early season. Mindful of what Mr. Reginald Farrer has said of
Mont Cenis towards the end of June, we may safely declare that the
Viola and Gentian clothed <DW72>s of that district are not the only
<DW72>s in the Alps which might be “visible for miles away.”

[Illustration: EARLY JUNE FIELDS beyond Praz de Fort in the Val
Ferret, backed by the Groupe du Grand Saint-Bernard et du Grand
Golliaz. ]

Perhaps some more substantial idea of these fields at this season
may be gathered from the pictures facing pages iii and 3; but these
transcriptions, though to the uninitiated they may appear reckless
with regard to truth, are really far from adequate. Seeing the
thing itself must, in this case, alone bring entire belief and
understanding. “Colour, the soul’s bridegroom,” is so abounding, so
fresh, light, joyful, and enslaving, that, after all has been said and
done to picture it, one sits listless, dejected and despairing over
one’s tame and lifeless efforts; one feels that it must be left to
speak for itself in its own frank, dreamland language—language at once
both elusive and comprehensible. The soul of things is possessed of an
eloquent and secret code which is every whit its own; and the soul of
these fields is no exception. In spite of Wordsworth, there is, and
there must be, “need of a remoter charm”; there is, and there must
be, an “interest unborrowed from the eye”; and it is just this vague,
appealing “something”—this “something” so real as to transcend what is
known as reality—which speaks to us and invades us in the bright and
intimate presence of these hosts of Alpine flowers.

In rural parts of England spring is said to have come when a maiden’s
foot can cover seven daisies at once on the village green. Why, when
spring had come here, on these Alpine meadows, I was putting my foot
(albeit of goodlier proportions than a maiden’s) upon at least a
score of Gentians! Whilst painting the study of Sulphur Anemones
(facing page 96) about May 20, my feet, camp-stool, and easel were
perforce crushing dozens of lovely flowers—flowers which in England
would have been fenced about with every sort of reverence. But
sacrifice is the _mot d’ordre_ of a live and useful world; worship
at any shrine is accompanied by some “hard dealing”; and, sadly as
it went against the grain, there was no gentler way in which I could
effect my purpose.

Looking at the close-set masses of blossom, it is difficult to realise
into what these <DW72>s and fields will develop later on. There seems
no room for a crop of hayfield grass. Amid this neat and packed
abundance there seems no possible footing for a wealth of greater
luxuriance. And yet, in a few weeks’ time, these fields will have
so changed as to be scarcely recognisable. What we see at present,
despite its ubiquity, is but a moiety of all they can produce. June
and July will border upon a plethora of wonders, though they will not
perhaps be rivals to the exquisite charm of May.




CHAPTER IV

THE VERNAL GENTIAN

    “Divin être d’azur au cœur pur qui scintille,
      Vis tranquille et joyeux sur le riant coteau,
    Car partout, fleur du ciel, où ta couronne brille
      Elle enfante la joie et luit comme un flambeau.”

                                        HENRY CORREVON.


Do you ask what the Alps would be without the Edelweiss? Ask, rather,
what they would be without the little Vernal Gentian! Ask what would
be the <DW72>s and fields of Alpine Switzerland without this flower
of heaven-reflected blue, rather than what the rocks and screes and
uncouth places would be without _Leontopodium alpinum_ of bloated
and untruthful reputation. Ask what Alpland’s springtide welcome and
autumnal salutation would be if shorn of this little plant’s bright
azure spontaneity; ask where would be spring’s eager joyfulness, and
where the ready hopefulness of autumn. Ask yourself this, and then
the Edelweiss at once falls back into a more becoming perspective
with the landscape, into a less faulty pose among the other mountain
flowers.

Perhaps it is not very venturesome to think that if the Edelweiss had
become extinct, and were now to be found only amid the fastnesses of
legend, it would live quite as securely in the hearts of men as it
does at present; for its repute rests mostly upon the fabulous. But
how different is the case of the earliest of the Gentians! Here is a
plant which, despite the romance-breeding nature of its habit, form,
and colour, draws little or nothing from legendary sources. Fable has
small command where merit is so marked; imagination is outstripped by
reality, and there is scarcely room for invention where truth is so
arresting, so pronounced.

_Gentiana verna_ flies no false colours. Its flower _is_ a flower,
and not for the greater part an assemblage of hoary-haired leaves. It
inspires in men no performance of mad gymnastics on the precipice’s
brink and brow; it wears, therefore, no halo of unnecessary human
sacrifice. It is not a tender token of attachment among lovers. It
does not live in myth, nor has it an important place in folk-lore. In
short, it is just its own bright, fascinating self; there is nothing
of blatant notoriety about its renown, no suspicion of a _succès de
scandale_ such as the Edelweiss can so justly claim.

We may laud the Edelweiss as a symbol of advanced endeavour, but the
Gentian is more useful, if not, indeed, worthier, in this respect;
for it marks no great extreme and therefore its condition is symbolic
of less that is incompatible with consistent human effort. Ruskin has
somewhere said that the most glorious repose is that of the chamois
panting on its bed of granite, rather than that of the ox chewing
the cud in its stall; but, however transcendentally true this may
be, the actually glorious position lies midway betwixt the two—the
position of the Gentian in relation with, for instance, the positions
of the Edelweiss and the Primrose. We are likely to derive inspiration
of more abundant practical value from the Gentian than from the
Edelweiss, because there is comparatively little about it that is
extreme. Though advanced in circumstance it is reasonably situated;
it leads, therefore, to no such flagrant inconsistency with facts,
no such beating of the drum of romance as, apparently, we find so
necessary in the case of Leontopodium. The Edelweiss is not all it
seems; the Gentian is. “_Il ne suffit pas d’être, il faut paraître_”;
and this, certainly, the little Vernal Gentian does. In not one single
trait does it belie the high colour of its blossom.

With what curiously different craft do each of these flowers play upon
the emotions! With what contrary art does each make its appeal to
our regard and adulation! To each we may address Swinburne’s stately
lines: to each we may, and do exclaim:

    “... with my lips I kneel, and with my heart
    I fall about thy feet and worship thee ...”

Yet this act of adoration, when it affects the Edelweiss, seems far
more an act of idolatry than it does when it affects the Gentian.
For on the one hand we have the Edelweiss stirring the imagination
to wild, foolhardy flights amid the awesome summer haunts of the
eagle and the chamois, when, in simple reality, we could if we would
be reposing amongst hundreds of its woolly stars upon some gentle
pasture-<DW72> away from the least hint of danger and of _scandale_;
while on the other hand we have the Vernal Gentian calling us at once
in all frankness to accept it as it is—one of the truest and loveliest
marvels of the Alps,

    “... the fair earth’s fond expression
    Of tenderness for heaven above ...”!

To each do we accord, as Mr. Augustine Birrell would say, “a mass of
greedy utterances”; to each do we lose our hearts; but only to one do
we lose our heads. And that one is the Edelweiss: the plant of leaves
which ape a flower; the plant whose flower is as inconspicuous as
that of our common Sun Spurge; the plant that would have us forget
its abundance on many a pasture, and think of it only as clinging
perilously to high-flung cliffs where browse the chamois and where
nest the choughs.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Gentian Family as a whole is possessed of very striking
individuality, and for the most part its members arrest more than
usual attention. Its name is said to be derived from Gentius, King
of Illyria, who is reputed to have first made known its medicinial
properties—tonic, emetic, and narcotic. Although it ranges from
Behring’s Straits to the Equator and on to the Antipodes, its
residence is mainly northern. In New Zealand its chief colour is red;
in Europe blue; and of all its blue European representatives none can
eclipse perennial _verna’s_ radiant star.

The Vernal Gentian is no stranger to England, though, as an indigenous
plant, it is a stranger to most Englishmen. It is still to be found
on wet limestone rocks in Northern England (Teesdale) and also in the
north-west of Ireland. Like _Gentiana nivalis_ of the small band of
Alpine annuals and tiniest of the blue-starred Gentians, it lingers
in the British Isles, a rare, pathetic remnant of past salubrity of
climate and condition; and to its homes in England and Ireland, rather
than in Switzerland, we should perhaps go to study how to grow it in
our gardens more successfully than we do at present. But it is to the
Alps that we must turn to find it revelling wealthily in a setting for
which it is pre-eminently suited; it is there that its

    “... living flowers
    Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet.”

For, in the Alps, it is an abundant denizen of the pastures in
general: both the grazing pastures or “Alps,” and “the artificial
modifications of the pastures,” as Mr. Newell Arber calls the meadows.

[Illustration: The PARADISE LILY (_Paradisia Liliastrum_) near the
Glacier de Trient about the middle of June. ]

If we wanted to give this Gentian an English name (and far be it
from me to suggest that we should do any such thing) we should
probably have to call it Spring-Felwort; Felwort being an old-time
title for _Gentiana amarella_, an annual herb common to dry pastures
and chalk downs in England, and possibly at one time employed
by tanners. In the Jura Mountains _verna_ goes by the name of
_Œil-de-chat_, and among the peasants inhabiting the northern side of
the Dent du Midi, in the Canton de Valais, I have heard it referred to
as _Le Bas du Bon Dieu_; but, considering the remarkably suggestive
character of the plant, the domain of folk-lore seems curiously
empty of its presence. This, possibly, is in part due to its amazing
abundance, and to the fact that it is to be found from about 1,200
feet to about 10,000 feet, thus causing it to meet with the proverbial
fate of things familiar. But, at any rate, its dried flowers, mixed
with those of the Rhododendron and the purple Viola, are used in
the form of “tea” by the montagnards as an antidote for chills and
rheumatism.

The appearance of _verna_ upon the pastures is not confined solely
to the early springtime; though this is the season of its greatest
wealth, it may be met with quite commonly in the late autumn. Indeed
it affects the days which circle round the whole of winter; and I
have found it several times even at Christmas near Arveyes, above
Gryon (Vaud), upon steep southward-facing banks where sun and wind
combined to chase away the snow. If, then, for no other reason than
this, it seems curious that romance has not gathered this Gentian
under its wing as it has the Edelweiss.

As for the radiant purity of its five-pointed azure stars, it is
perhaps only outshone by that of the Myosotis-like flowers of
_Eritrichium nanum_, King of the Alps; but even this rivalry is
doubtful when _verna_ is growing upon a limestone soil, where its
blossoms are more brilliant than those produced upon granitic ground.

Blue, however, although it is the superabundant type-colour, is not
the invariable hue of its blossoms; indeed, it shows more variety
than even many a botanist suspects, and I have found it in all tints
from deep French to pale Cambridge blue, from rich red-purple to the
palest lilac, and from the faintest yellow-white, through blush-white,
to the purest blue-white. I have, too, found it party-,
blue-and-white.

These many variations from the type give occasion for suggestive
questions that I fain would indicate, because I believe with Mr. Arber
that such variations can only “arise from deep-seated tendencies,
which find their expression in the existence of the individual,
and the evolution of the race.” For instance, are the mauve and
plum- flowers a break-back to the ancestral type; that is
to say, was the more primitive _verna_ red? Blue flowers are more
highly organised than those of other colours; are, then, all flowers
striving to be blue—like Emerson’s grass, “striving to be man?” The
French-blue Gentians are of warmer tint than those of Cambridge hue;
are they, therefore, the first decided step into this highest of the
primary colours: are they the first strikingly victorious effort of
the plant to shake off all trammel of red? And white; what of white?
I have seen white _verna_ tinged with rose, and white _verna_ of a
white altogether free from any tint of grossness—a white so positive
as to suggest the utmost frailty arising from degeneracy, if it were
not known to be the natural consequence of persistent advance through
blue. These are nice points for speculation.

But “let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause”! Blue for us
is the essential colour for this Gentian: we can dispense with all its
efforts to be white. Blue, not white, is the hue of promise. And it
is promise we look for at the turn of the year; it is promise we must
have after long months of snow. When youthful “chevalier Printemps”
hymns us his ancient message; when in penetrating accents of triumph
he tells us:

    “C’est moi que Dieu sur terre envoie
    Dans un rayon de son soleil
    Pour mettre la terre en joie,
    Pour faire un monde tout vermeil.
    Quand l’hiver m’a crié ‘qui vive!’
    J’ai dit: ‘Fais-moi place, il est temps!
    Du Paradis tout droit j’arrive:
    Je suis le chevalier Printemps!’”

—when, I say, spring thus speaks to us of the rout of winter and the
dawn of a wealthier life, it is blue that we look for most upon the
frost-stained fields; blue not white—the blue of the type-flowered
Gentian, not the white of the Alpine Crowfoot and Crocus.

Whilst writing these lines on the most fascinating spring flower of
the Alps, there comes before my mind one spot in particular where it
abounds in May—a certain long and rapid grassy <DW72> at Le Planet,
above Argentière (Haute-Savoie). Albeit not in Switzerland, Le Planet
is only just across the frontier; and, as every one who knows the
district will attest, it is difficult to draw a rigid, formal line
where flowers and mountains are so knit in common semblance. Other
rich scenes of azure I can recall—as on the swelling <DW72>s of the
Jura around the Suchet, or on the fields which mount from Naters
towards Bel-Alp; but none forces itself to mind with such persistence
as does this <DW72> at Le Planet. And it is because the surrounding
circumstance illustrates so well all that I have been saying about
this Gentian’s presence in the spring.

The <DW72> in question is not five minutes’ stroll from the hotel.
On the plateau itself _verna_ is all but absent, but on this broad
and steep incline it congregates in such amazing numbers that, as I
think on it, I am sure all I have said of this witching flower is
poor and paltry. After all, verbal magniloquence is perhaps out of
place, and simplicity is the best translator of such magnificence.
All shades of brightest blue are here presented; for, excepting a few
pale plum- clusters, the brilliant type-flower is ubiquitous,
blending delightfully with the little yellow Violet and with the
white, fluffy seedheads of the Coltsfoot.

But what, perhaps, makes this particular <DW72> so appropriate in
point of illustration for this chapter is, that above it towers the
mighty Aiguille Verte, decked as in winter with its snows and ice, and
in the foreground lies the frozen remains of a great avalanche strewn
with fallen rocks and pierced by stricken larch-trees.

       *       *       *       *       *

Yes; from the lichen, _Umbilicaria virginis_, the furthest outpost
of vegetable life as it clings to the Jungfrau’s awful rocks at
an altitude of 13,000 feet, to the yellow Primrose of the woods
and meadows of the plains, there is no plant of Alpland that is so
precious, so rare in its very abundance as _Gentiana verna_. Nor is
there another Alpine that can make so wide and so certain an appeal.
Spread broadcast and alone upon the awakening turf of mountain <DW72>
and meadow, it captivates the instant attention of even the merest
passer-by. And if amongst its abounding azure there happens, as will
often be the case, a vigorous admixture of healthy rose and yellow—the
rose of the Mealy or Bird’s-eye Primula, the yellow of the Sulphur
Anemone and Marsh Marigold—then this were a scene to “make the pomp
of emperors ridiculous”; a scene of subtly true magnificence, of
perfectly balanced delight.

See the Vernal Gentian as it lies thus bountifully set, a radiant
blue carpet of heavenly intensity, backed majestically by winter’s
receding snows on mighty glacier and stupendous peak; note its myriad
white-eyed, cœrulean blossoms over which hover with tireless wing
its faithful, eager friends, the humming-bird and bee hawk-moths—the
very picture of security and peace amid a scene of awful, threatening
grandeur. Listen—listen, the while, to the thunder coming from “the
vexed paths of the avalanches”; listen to the sound of falling rock
and pine, and mark the great air-tossed cloud of powdered snow; listen
to the alarm-cry of the speckled mountain-jay, and to the shriek-like
warning of the marmot; then tell me if there is any other flower
that could so well play the part of hope-inspiring herald to a world
as harassed as is that of the Alps in the season that surrounds the
winter?




CHAPTER V

IN STORM AND SHINE

    “Well roars the storm to those that hear
    A deeper voice across the storm.”

                                        TENNYSON.


Although Nature is moving apace, and the poet declares he has even
“heard the grasses springing underneath the snow”; although one set
of flowers is surplanting another in startlingly swift succession,
and the first-fruits of the Alpine year are already on the wane, we
will take our own time and study this progress with deliberate care
and attention. We have seen May smiling; we ought—nay, we are in
duty bound—to see her frowning. Like the récluse of Walden, we ought
each of us to become a “self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and
rainstorms.”

[Illustration: JUNE MEADOWS of Salvia, Lychnis, &c., in the Val
Ferret, just before arriving at the village of Praz de Fort. ]

An undoubtedly noble and proper philosophy assures us that there
is truth and beauty in no matter what condition, and that they who
see nothing but what is tiresome or hideous in certain estates,
draw the overplus of tiresomeness and hideousness from their own
selves. “Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty,” says this philosophy;
“how, then,” it queries, “can any condition be unbeautiful? Is it not
yourselves who are in part lacking in a sense of loveliness, since
truth can never really be unbeautiful?”

Now, whatever we think of this as a species of sophistry, it behoves
us to look into it with quiet and decent care. An everyday world, deep
in its old conventions, will declare that it is certainly straining
a point to try thus to make all geese appear as swans. With the
exception of the poet minded to verse the innate grandeur of gloom,
the entire sublimity of storm, the entrancing mellowness of fog and
rain, and the wild joy which comes with a blizzard; or perhaps of the
painter minded to achieve in paint what the poet is doing in ink (both
of them, most probably, contriving their rhapsodies within the snug
seclusion of their rooms)—with the exception of these two privileged
persons comfortably absorbed in justifying a bias, an everyday world,
voting bad weather a kill-joy and mar-plot, will find happiness only
in avoiding and forgetting it.

Be that as it may; be fog, wind, and cloud and driving rain and sleet
a luxury in which we should revel—or not; of all places in the world
in bad weather, the Alps at springtide and at the altitude at which
we are now studying them, are probably among the most interesting and
absorbing. Let an everyday world, or as much of it as can, come and
judge for itself.

If in our composition we have a grain of love for Nature and for
Nature-study, there is a fund of opportunity for exercising it even
in cloudland at its gloomiest; and if, as in the present case, we are
bent upon studying the flowers and the means for their more adequate
reception into our English homelands, then bad weather holds for us
an amount of experience such as will aid us materially in our object.
“Inclemency” takes so large a share in the nurture of these flowers.
By companying with them when steeped in cloud and swept by wind, we
catch an important glimpse of the grim and forceful side of their
existence which is a prime cause of the superlative loveliness that so
impresses us when the sun does shine from out an immaculate azure.

Just as the cheese-mite is a product of the cheese, and has attained
its beauty and efficiency because of the nature of cheese, so are
these Alpines the wonderful things they are because of the nature
of the conditions with which they have to contend and upon which
they have to subsist. It is all very well for us to arrive upon the
scene at this late moment in their existence, transplant them to our
gardens, and there grow them, maybe, with marked success; it is all
very well for us to annex them now to our retinue of chattels, lord
it over them, and display them on our rockworks as if it were to us
and to our care and trouble that they owe their beauty; but these
plants have arrived at what they are without us and our attentions.
Our gardens never made them what they are, or gave them one particle
of their supreme and striking beauty. Nor are our gardens likely to
heighten that beauty in any real way; much more likely is it that we
shall arrive at degrading their refinement by bringing it down from
the severe purity of the skies to the grosser, easier circumstance of
our sheltered soil.

Alpine plants, perhaps because of the extreme conditions with which
they have to contend, and therefore because of the extreme measures
they have to take in order to defend themselves, seem to be possessed
of an efficiency surpassing that of most other plants. They are what
incessant warfare has made of them; they delight in it. Strenuous
children of strenuous circumstance, they are self-reliant to a degree,
and hold themselves with a winning air of independence. But it is
independence begot of strict dependence; they admit as much quite
frankly and sanely—an admittal of which man might well make a note in
red ink. Nature all over the world is saying, not, “Let me help you
to be independent,” but, “You shall and must depend upon me for your
independence.” And no living things have better understood this truth
than have the Alpines; no living things have acknowledged and mastered
this obligation more thoroughly than they. Hence their beauty; hence
their serenity and “nerve”; hence their “blended holiness of earth and
sky.”

Mark with what consummate efficiency these Alpine field-flowers cope
with stern inclemency. Tossed and torn by storms for which the Alps
are famous, see how they anchor themselves to Mother Earth! Washed
by torrential rains upon the rapid <DW72>s, or parched by the most
personal of suns, small wonder that their roots, in many cases, should
form by far the greater part of their bulk and stature. They recall
to mind that learned professor who, wishing possibly to postulate
something “new,” declared to an unconvinced but amused world that what
it saw of a tree was not the tree—the tree was underground.

Whilst painting in the Val d’Arpette in June of this year (1910), I
met with a striking instance of the boisterous treatment to which
these plants must accustom themselves. The day was radiantly fine (as
any one may see from the picture facing page 24), yet suddenly, and
without warning, a most violent wind tore through the little valley,
sweeping everything loose and insecure before it, upsetting my easel
and camp-stool, carrying my Panama hat up on to the snow, and making
of the Anemones and Violas a truly sorry sight.

This violence, albeit of a somewhat different nature, reminded me
of several experiences I had had of uncommonly powerful eddies of
wind, travelling, like some waterspout at sea, slowly, in growling,
whirring spirals, over the steep pastures, tearing up the grass and
blossoms and carrying them straight and high up into the air; whilst
all around—except myself!—remained unmoved and peaceful. I have seen
such eddies strike a forest, shaking and swaying the giant pines like
saplings, wrenching off dead wood and many a piece of living branch,
and whirling them aloft. Under a glorious sky and amid the solitude
and stillness of the Alps, such violence is at least uncanny, if
not a little unnerving. One is moved to turn in admiration to the
ever-smiling Alpines and ejaculate:

    “Brave flowers—that I could gallant it like you,
    And be as little vain!”

With this as a sample—and a by no means uncommon sample—of what they
have to withstand, small wonder that so many of these plants have
endowed themselves with such a deep, tenacious grip upon their home!
Try with your trowel to dig up an entire root of, for instance,
the Alpine Clover (_Trifolium alpinum_), or the Sulphur Anemone,
or the Bearded Campanula, or the tall blue Rampion (_Phyteuma
betonicifolium_), or even so diminutive a plant as _Sibbaldia
procumbens_, or of so modest a one as _Plantago alpina_, and you will
be astounded at the depth to which you must delve. You will find it
the same with a hundred other subjects; and, unless you be digging
in some loose and gritty soil, most probably your amazement will end
in despair, and in destruction to the plant. More likely than not,
you will hack through the main root long before you have unearthed
the end of it. If for no other reason than this, then, it is at least
unwise to try to uproot these pasture-flowers. Should they be required
for the home-garden, it is far wiser and better behaviour to gather
seed from them later in the season. Most of them grow admirably from
seed thus gathered and _sown as soon as possible_; most of them
develop rapidly and blossom within two years; and with this grand
advantage over uprooted plants—they are able to acclimatize themselves
from birth to their new conditions and surroundings, their translation
being no rude and abrupt transition from one climate to another.

In this and in many other directions, it is when bad weather sweeps
the Alps that we can perhaps best learn from Nature what Emerson
learnt from her: that “she suffers nothing to remain in her Kingdom
which cannot help itself.” And, in learning how these plants help
themselves, we are also learning how best we can help them when we
remove them to our gardens. Bad weather is the greatest of teachers
all the world over. On sunny days we enjoy and admire what is very
largely the product of the storms.

Everything, even the worst thing, in its place, is a good thing. As
all sunshine and no storm would make man a nonentity, so would it
produce Alpines devoid of their present great ability and comeliness.
A thing of complete beauty is a thing of all weathers; and it is a
thing of present joy, and of joy for ever, because of much anguish in
the past. You and I could see nothing of loveliness if it were not for
ugliness; and these Alpines would not be worth looking at were it not
for the awful attempts made by Nature to overwhelm them. “A perpetual
calm will never make a sailor”; or, as Mr. Dooley says, “Foorce rules
the wurruld”—and keeps it peacefully disturbed, bewitchingly “alive.”

And Alpine inclemency possesses an æsthetic value which is as
important as it is alluring. Whether “in the smiles or anger of the
high air,” these flower-fields are invariably things of beauty; even
as the diamond glitters in the gloom, so do these pastures shine
throughout the storm. What could be more æsthetically beautiful than
the rosy expanses of Mealy Primrose bathed in dense, driving mists,
or (as in the picture facing page 16) the regiments of Globe-Flower,
standing pale but fascinating, in weather which, were we down on
the plains, we should consider “not fit for a dog to be abroad
in”? Or what more winsome than the widespread colonies of Bartsia,
Micheli’s Daisy, Pedicularis, Biscutella, and Bell-Gentian (_Gentiana
verna_, unfortunately, is closed when the sun hides itself), lying
subdued but colour-full beside the steaming waters of the lake?

[Illustration: Field of _CAMPANULA RHOMBOIDALIS_ on the Col de la
Forclaz, about the beginning of July. ]

Ah! where one of these Alpine lakes is in the landscape, what wonders
of Nature’s artistry we may watch when rough winds howl and toss the
seething cloud into ever-changing combinations of tint, form, and
texture!

    “With how ceaseless motion, with how strange
    Flowing and fading, do the high Mists range
    The gloomy gorges of the Mountains bare”!

A hundred hues of grey fill the vapour-laden air and are mirrored in
receptive waters—hues with which the fresh rose of the Primula and the
rich, full yellow of the Marsh-Marigold blend with perfect felicity,
lending that touch of human appeal which makes the scene ideal.

The forests, too, are never so picturesque as when clouds cling to
the pine and larch, softening the tone and carriage of these somewhat
formal trees, and breaking up every suggestion of monotony in their
reiterated masses. A soft, weird, intimately mysterious beauty reigns
over everything. What matter the winds and the rains if they bring
us such expression? By what is regret justified in all this witchery?
Regret that the sun no longer shines, inducing the Vernal Gentian to
open wide its bright blue eyes? Nay; here, in Alp-land, if nowhere
else, does an ultimate philosophy speak possibly of what is actual;
here, if nowhere else, bad weather is but a delightful foil to bright
and sunny days. Regret! There is no right room for such repining: no
sound and balanced reason to moan, as moans, for instance, the Chinese
poet:

    “If only to darken the darkness, O Thou in Thy heavens above,
    Why dost Thou light for a moment the lamp of a beautiful thing?”

For in the Alps the lamp of Beauty burns without cessation; and where
wondrous flowering pastures border some rough-cut lake, legacy from
glaciers long since retired, the lamp burns always brightly.

By writing of inclemency in such full-flavoured tones, I am not trying
to make the best of a bad case; I am simply and honestly setting
forth the undoubted good there is in what may seem “impossible.” Any
one who has lived with these things and has watched them springtime
after springtime, is usually in no way eager to run away, although
well aware that the sheltered distractions of the towns are within
quite easy reach. One finds no really compensating counterpart in
kursaals and shop-windows for an Alpine springtime where flowering
pastures kiss “the crystal treasures of the liquid world.” One need
not be a poet, one need not be a painter, one need not be a mystic,
and one certainly need be no “neurasthenic” to appreciate the
figurative sunshine of which spring’s Alpine inclemency is redolent.
One has but to be natural—a sanely-simple human being, dismissing the
hampering prejudices and conventions born of towns, and allowing the
appeal of Nature to come freely into its own. Then oneself is busy
a-weaving—a-weaving of cobweb dreams; and the cobwebs are woven of
material worthy, substantial, and real. One’s dreams are not of that
solid, sordid order, nor of that frail, unhealthy nature so common
with dreams arising from unnatural town-life. They are children of
completest sanity, and they are in no part begot of _ennui_. One
builds, and one builds for health’s sake; nor does the building know
aught of “castles in Spain.” There is no question here of anæmic
fancy. All that one dreams is not only possible, but sound, touching
upon realities which control and direct the best of destinies.
Compared with town-life, one is in a new world; and it is often
astounding to think that town-life is a necessity to which one is
obliged to add the important word “imperative.”

And all this may be so even in wet weather. Here, even when clouds
hold everything in damp and clinging embrace, we may

    “Grow rich in that which never taketh rust.”

And grow rich quite comfortably; for have we not our mackintoshes and
goloshes!

The Alps are not ours for climbing purpose only. They are not for us
only when winter rules and gives us sports abounding, or when the
snows retire to the cradles of the glaciers, and the days of late
July and those of August and September grant us the conditions we
most seek for long excursions. They are ours also for an intermediate
season: a season of the utmost value, though, maybe, not for “sport.”
Mr. Frederic Harrison, speaking of “the eternal mountains, vocal with
all the most majestic and stirring appeals to the human spirit,” and
of the treatment of them by those who think only of “rushing from
pass to pass and from peak to peak in order to beat Tompkins time
or establish a new record,” says: “Switzerland might be made one of
the most exquisite schools of every sense of beauty, one of the most
pathetic schools of spiritual wonder.” And Mr. Harrison is right: this
school exists, and is no mere fiction wrought of sentimental thinking.
Nor is it ever closed to students—although there be periods when the
attendance is lamentably slack. We know that its doors stand wide open
in the winter and in the summer; let it be known, and as well known,
that they stand equally wide open in the spring. Let it be known,
moreover, that in spite sometimes of fickle, fitful weather, it is
in the spring, above all other seasons, that this school is “one of
the most exquisite schools of every sense of beauty, one of the most
pathetic schools of spiritual wonder.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Then once again,

    “The sunlight, leaping from the Heights,
    Flames o’er the fields of May,

       •     •     •     •     •

    And butterflies and insect mites,
    Born with the new-blown day,
    Cross fires in shifting opal lights
    From spray to beckoning spray,”

and we are aware that during the brief period of inclemency a very
astonishing change has been taking place in our surroundings under
cover of the heavy mists. Nature has been speedily busy, robing the
fields in garments fit for June. Before the mists closed down upon
us a few days ago insect-life was noticeable mostly by its scarcity.
Except for the Orange-Tip and Dingy Skipper butterflies, and for the
Skipper-like moth, _Euclidia Mi_, flitting among the Saponarias,
Daisies, and Geums, and for a dainty milk-white spider on the rosy
heads of _Primula farinosa_, there was little of “life” among the
flowers. But now the butterflies are legion, a brilliant pea-green
spider has joined the white one, and lustrous little beetles—among the
most beautiful of Alpine creatures—are either frolicking or basking in
the glorious sunshine on the wild Peppermint and other fragrant herbs.
As for the flowers themselves, they have more than doubled in kind, if
not actually in beauty and in number.

Indeed, there is such transformation in the meadows as makes us
rub our eyes and wonder if we have not slept the sleep of Rip van
Winkle! The Gentians have all but gone, the Anemone also, and
_Primula farinosa_ has become most rare. In their places stand the
Globe-Flower, the Bistort, the Paradise Lily (barely open), the Sylvan
Geranium, the blue Centaurea, and the pale yellow Biscutella, while
the last blossoms of _Anemone sulphurea_ have been joined by the
exquisite blush-tinted heads of _Anemone narcissiflora_. It is as
though some curtain had rolled swiftly up upon another landscape—one
which, as we are but human, we must applaud more rapturously than we
did the last. For—

    “To-day fresh colours break the soil, and butterflies take wing
    Down broidered lawns all bright with pearls in the garden
         of the King.”

And although we still may say we are in dainty May, more than the toe
of our best foot is already in gorgeous June.




CHAPTER VI

THE JUNE MEADOWS

    “The showers are over, the skiffing showers,
    Come, let us rise and go
    Where the happy mountain flowers,
    Children of the young June hours,
    In their sweet haunts blow.”

                                        PRINCIPAL SHAIRP.


“On prête aux riches,” and here is Nature lending yet more wealth to
fields that were already so wealthy! It is simply amazing with what
doting enthusiasm she pours her floral riches upon the Alps! Many who
know only the June fields in England think that we who write of the
Swiss fields at this season are either in a chronic state of hysteria,
or else do wilfully point our story as if it were a snake story or
the story of a tiger-hunt. But, let the fact be known, in writing or
speaking upon this subject, the exigencies of the English language
oblige us to be temperate; it is quite impossible to exaggerate.
We may use all the adjectives in Webster, yet have we not even then
said enough. Acutely conscious of our ineffectual effort, we have,
nevertheless, done our best. We could say no more: the rest we must
feel, and endeavour that our readers shall feel with us.

[Illustration: In the EARLY JULY FIELDS at Champex.]

Maybe it is with us as it was with Robert Louis Stevenson when he was
at Davos in search of a remedy for the malady that afterwards drove
him to Samoa and to an early grave upon her mountains—maybe all our
“little fishes talk like whales”; but, believe us, whale-talk is the
only talk befitting. If Stevenson finds “it is the Alps who are to
blame,” we find it is quite as much the fault of the Alpine flora;
and if Stevenson found comfort in the fact that he was not alone in
being forced to “this yeasty inflation, this stiff and strutting
architecture of the sentence,” so also can we.

We English are not the only ones to find ourselves at the ineffectual
extreme of language. The German tourist—and he is nowadays more
enterprisingly early than are we in visiting the Alps—is equally at a
loss, as he stands in wonderment and, with characteristic emphasis,
repeatedly utters the one resounding word “Kolossal!” Even the
Englishman loses his habitual reserve, and, if he does not voice his
wonderment as loudly as does his Teutonic brother, he is at least
amazed in his own insular way. Assuredly, if these flowers themselves
could speak, and speak out frankly, they would declare our seemingly
over- appreciation a very tame performance; they would vouch
that we are a long way from being in the shoes of the proverbial
amateur fisherman.

But let me, without further ado, attempt to describe some of the cause
for this. Let me turn again for example to Champex and to notes made
on the spot, and speak of a seven-hours’ walk down the rapid southern
<DW72>s which fall away from the lake, by the village of Prassorny,
along the Val Ferret to Praz de Fort and the _massif_ of Saleinaz,
and back again to Champex by that scramble of a path which mounts
the <DW72>s directly from the village of Ville d’Issert. This walk
takes us from 4,800 feet down to some 3,300 feet, and affords us as
representative a range of <DW72>s and fields as we could find anywhere.
Starting amid rolling _hectares_ of Orchids and Lilies, passing
along wide <DW72>s bestrewn with Lychnis and Anthericum, winding
through copse and forest-edge peopled with Everlasting Pea and Alpine
Eglantine, we arrive by entrancing stages amid crowded meadows of
Salvia, Bistort, Ranunculus, Campion, Marguerite, Geranium, Campanula,
and Phyteuma—meadows which, in long and wide-flung swell, sweep like
a multi- wave to lave the snowy sides and graceful, flowing
forms of the Groupe du Grand Saint-Bernard and Grand Golliaz.

Used as I am to the glories of the mountain flora, I am moved afresh
to wonder each time I come intimately amongst them, and such a walk
as I took this day, the 15th of June, is always a revelation. From
the very start to the very finish there was a continuous procession
of as amazingly rich and variedly  fields as, surely, any
quarter of the globe would find it difficult to surpass. Sometimes
the predominant colour was clear yellow, sometimes rich French blue,
and not infrequently, when there was no such distinct predominance,
the fields, especially when the sun was at the back of me, were
as bewildering as, I imagine, would be fields flashing with a
profusion of every known gem. Steep grassy <DW72>s—in places almost
perpendicular; long, hot stretches of grass-grown grit and rubble;
rich ousy dips and hollows; undulating acres of wavy, feather-light
meadows—all were decked alike in such kaleidoscopic abundance as
forced me repeatedly to exclaim: “Oh that some of this loveliness
could be translated as fields to England! If only England would try!”

Here I must beg leave to make a slight digression from the strictness
of my subject. At one spot in the steep descent, just outside the
tiny hamlet of Prassorny, I came upon a blaze of colour which stood
out from all else—a pre-eminently arresting object in the landscape.
It was, of all things, our old friend the scarlet Field Poppy! To
come upon this inimitable flower spread in serried numbers over
a large square of ground on a steep <DW72> at an altitude of over
4,000 feet, was not a little surprising. Waving its battalions of
fiery blossoms against the grey mist-filled valley beneath, with
old sun and wind-stained châlets standing just beside, it was an
irresistible _motif_ for a painter. Seemingly as much at home as
in any field in England, it appeared of even greater brilliance
than with us—having, perhaps, caught something of the humour of the
Gentian. That this Poppy can possibly intensify its hue over and
above what we know it can achieve in the cornfields of the plains,
will seem incredible—another instance of whale-talk on the writer’s
part! And yet such is certainly the case—as, indeed, it is the case
with many another lowland flower whose powers will allow it to climb.
These poppies, here on this <DW72>, stood witness for the fact; and
so, too, did the other lowland flowers growing with them. There
were Cornflowers and Larkspur of a blue more rich and radiant than
it is even in the plains; and _Viola tricolor_, too, the <DW29> of
our own cornfields, was of a purple and yellow more deep than we
are accustomed to have it. There was, also, the exquisite _Adonis
aestivalis_ of most vivid salmon-orange—its dainty blossoms standing
like fire-flies against the rich blue masses of _Salvia pratensis_.i>.

Yet this was not a corn-patch (one can scarcely call them cornfields
at this altitude, where they are mere terraces, many of them, like
potato-patches, standing almost at an angle of 45°, carved from out
the steep mountain-side by generations of thrifty peasants). In all
probability, however, this particular terrace with its wealth of
cornfield flowers had in quite recent years been sown with oats
or rye. Anyway, it were well worth taking note of this Poppy’s
presence hereabouts, if only because on the <DW72> next door was the
Bell-Gentian!

After this “parenthetic enthusiasm” over so homely an intruder, we
will hie us back to the more usual denizens of these <DW72>s and
fields. Perhaps enough has already been said to show what a poor
thing language is when in the presence of such splendours as June
spreads before us in the Alps. Very few, if any, of the flowers were
growing singly or even sparsely; they were usually in dense bright
masses, or close and broad-spread legions, forming an “infinite floral
broidery” stretching above, below, in front, and behind as far as eye
could reach. What a difficult, almost impossible matter it has been
to select for pictorial presentation such sections of this wealthy
panorama as shall give some small idea of the whole, will readily be
understood. Halting attempts, however, will be found in the pictures
facing pages 32 and 48. And to supplement and reinforce these, there
is, at the end of this chapter, a short list of the chief grass-land
flowers met with during my walk. The rock-plants, and those liking the
poorest of soil, though they certainly add an important quota to the
brilliant prospect, have not been taken into account, as they fall
somewhat outside our present purpose.

       *       *       *       *       *

In his poem, “In Praise of June,” Leigh Hunt sings:

    “May, by coming first in sight,
    Half defrauds thee of thy right;
    For her best is shared by thee
    With a wealthier potency;
    So that thou dost bring us in
    A sort of May-time masculine.”

But this is only in small part true of these Alpine fields. There
is, to be sure, something of the May fields in the June fields, but
all of May’s best is certainly not shared by June—not, that is to
say, unless we climb up higher than we intend to do. The Crocus and
Soldanella have gone; they came “to show the paths that June must
tread,” not to tread those paths with the Orchid and the Lily. Gone,
also, is the pure yellow-petalled Mountain Geum. The Marsh Marigold,
too, is no longer with us in rich, golden crowds; nor does the Mealy
Primula spread its rosy carpet over acre upon acre. One misses, also,
the bright white presence of Micheli’s Daisy; and the Vernal Gentian,
“blue with the beauty of windless skies,” though still lingering
here and there, is, for the most part, hidden by the Grasses and the
Clovers.

Ah! yes, the Clovers—pink, rose-red, crimson, cream, white, yellow:
we must not forget these! Of goodly and varied company, they are
such important units in the rich composition of most Alpine meadows,
and, where they grow, they form so compact a groundwork of colouring
and so admirable a setting for many of the taller flowers, that
it were, indeed, a dereliction of memory to overlook them! What
could be lovelier than a wide area of these Clovers in June sown
with lilac, rose-tinted, and white Orchids, deep, lustrous-blue
Phyteumas, paper-white Paradise Lilies, and infinite hosts of the
bright and fascinating little Euphrasia? Or in July, when the orange
Arnica, the porcelain-blue _Campanula barbata_, and the graceful,
distinguished-looking little _Thesium alpinum_ make their ever-welcome
appearance in the fields? Of course, there are degrees even in natural
felicity, and the Orchids—with the exception of the creamy-white
Butterfly Orchis—are not at their best if the predominant Clover
be red. But, speaking generally, the groundwork of Clovers is a
most valuable element in the colouring of these pastures. Were this
groundwork removed we should wonder why the fields and <DW72>s looked
so meagre and thin. And this is also true of _Euphrasia officinalis_,
the Eyebright, a very precious, though humble denizen of the fields
in July. This plant, by the way, owes its English name, not to its
flower (as in the case of the little bright-blue Speedwell, _Veronica
Chamædrys_, often erroneously called Eyebright), but to an infusion
of the plant which long ago was supposed to cure defective vision.
Milton, indeed, causes the Archangel Michael to use it upon Adam:

    “... then purged with Euphrasy and Rue
    The visual nerve, for he had much to see.”

[Illustration: EVENING among the fields of pink Bistort at Lac
Champex; sunset-glow on the Grand Combin, July. ]

Like the Clovers, the Eyebright should certainly not be ignored,
though it is easy to do so. It may be numbered amongst those things we
should miss without being able to say _what_ we do miss—those things
of a high and unobtrusive value, partly composed of half the worth of
things in greater evidence. In other words, it is amongst those things
which, in a quiet, self-effacing way, enhance their surroundings.

In applying the term “distinguished-looking” to the little Thesium,
I am minded to do so because, just as with the flowers of the plain,
there is an _élite_ among Alpines. One can hardly explain why. Like
the Roman Emperor who, when asked to define time, said, “I know when
you do not ask me,” one feels there is an _élite_ among flowers,
though one is scarcely able to define it. And the feeling is real and
undoubtedly well-founded. Nor, to feel this, is it necessary to go to
florist’s garden-flowers, where vulgarity is rampant (though often
highly prized and priced). The feeling comes in the presence of any
field of wild flowers—the feeling that, by their form and bearing,
some plants are more well-bred than others. This cannot be altogether
accounted for by their colour or conspicuousness. The little Thesium,
or the little silver-leaved Alchemilla are neither of them bright,
conspicuous plants. It is the general habit that impresses: the
“atmosphere” with which they surround themselves. How manifest this
is when one meets with the Paradise Lily surrounded by a sea of
Hieracium, Bistort, Blue Bottle, Trollius, Geranium, and Salvia.
One singles out the Lily at once, though it be close beside the
exquisite white Marguerite; and one’s heart goes out to it, above its
companions, as a thing of greater breeding—a thing taking rank with
any Lœlia or Dendrobium.

A cat is not a horse because it is born in a stable; and all Alpines
are not of the same caste because they are born in the Alps. Among
things Alpine, as among things of the plain, there is degree in
attainment. Some things have had occasion to travel along lines that
have led them to greater refinement than others—just as man, himself,
is evidently the product of particular occasion for such travel. We
cannot blink ourselves to the fact that there are weeds even among the
Alpines—though there are not so many as 280, the number said to exist
in England.

Degree in refinement is, perhaps, to some extent indicated by the
way a plant will take care of itself. All plants have some means of
fending for themselves, and these means are as varied in morality as
are such means among human beings. Some are born fighters, brazen,
pushing, and quarrelsome; others win through life by comparative
self-effacement. Some elbow their way to any place they want; others,
seemingly, are content to be where they are wanted. All, of course,
battle more or less faithfully, but some are forceful, self-assertive,
while others resign themselves to unobtrusiveness. No plant can accept
with entire equanimity what does not altogether agree with it; but
many can rough it, putting up with conditions that will kill others or
compel them to retire. Hence we have weeds: rough-souled invaders who
make themselves too common.

Although “the invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous
in the common,” and although, therefore, we may admire, and quite
reasonably admire, all that so capably wrestles with extremes of
circumstance as do the Alpines, yet we can and must admit that some
are more “classy” than others. For instance, the Alpine Plantain is,
according to our instinct and possibly according to fact, on a lower
rung of the ladder of vegetable society than is the Alpine Auricula.
Both struggle with much the same rigours and disabilities, but we feel
obliged to find that the latter has evolved greater refinement than
the former from its struggles. In short, Maeterlinck’s “_goût du mieux
de la Nature_” is as pronounced in degree among Alpines as it is
among valley flowers; there is an aristocracy even in the Alps.

And how admirable, for the most part, are the names these plants
bear; how befitting the romantic character and circumstance which
surrounds them. Linaria, Saponaria, Salvia, Ajuga, Anthyllis,
Potentilla, Artemisia—what could be more charming? Are they not
a thousand times more suggestive and more æsthetic than their
English counterparts—Toadflax, Soapwort, Sage, Bugle, Kidney Vetch,
Cinquefoil, Wormwood? Indeed, I am not sure but that, taking them as a
whole, Latin names are not more satisfactory and picturesque for every
kind of flower—quite apart from the important and simplifying question
of a common vantage ground for gardener, scientist, and general
public. The anonymous writer of “Studies in Gardening,” an admirable
series of essays contributed to the _Times_, pleads persuasively for
the use, as far as possible, of English names in both gardening books
and papers. He holds—and in so doing he is by no means singular—that
“the rage for Latin names has gone so far that you will now sometimes
see lilies called liliums”; he bemoans the growing use of Sedum
instead of Stone-crop, and of Antirrhinum instead of Snapdragon, and
he calls it an “unnecessary use of botanical terms,” and thinks that
“the want of beautiful English names to many beautiful flowers seems
a reproach to their beauty.” But there are other authorities, equally
numerous, who hold a contrary view, considering that too much is being
made of English names, and that “confusion worst confounded” is a very
natural consequence. One catches the sound of more than two voices in
the discussion: one hears not only the several plaints of botanist
and flower-lover, but also the claims of the champion of folk-lore,
the mere amateur gardener, the uncompromising patriot, and the
incorrigible sentimentalist. And something in reason is said by each
one of them—although honours are not so easy as to enable one to call
it a case of six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. For, perhaps,
those who strive for a _langue bleu_ in this domain and choose Latin
have the weightier cause at heart. George Crabbe, the poet, once wrote
an English treatise on botany, but never published it, because of
the remonstrances of the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, who
objected to degrading the science of botany by treating it in a modern
language. Such rigorous adhesion to Latin is of the relatively narrow
past; nor is this dead tongue likely ever again to be a subject for
such blind idolatry. No doubt in time a becoming compromise will be
arrived at by the two camps—a compromise that will allow a rose to be
a rose, and not oblige it to be always and only a _Rosa_.

“Men of science are pitiless tyrants,” says Alphonse Karr in “Les
Fleurs Animées.” “See what they have done for Botany, that charming
and graceful study!... Without pity or mercy, they have brutally
seized upon the frail daughters of sky and dew; they have crushed and
mutilated them; they have thrown them into the crucible of Etymology,
and after all these awful tortures, and as if to assure themselves of
impunity, they have hidden their victims beneath a heap of barbarous
names. Thus, thanks to them, the Hawthorn, that symbol of virginity
and hope, sighs under the dreadful name _Mespilus oxyacantha_....
All that is frightful, is it not?... Unfortunately, it is all very
necessary. To admire is not to know, and, in order to know, system
and method are indispensable.... How could we do without the help of
Etymology? Pardon, then, these men of science, who have done nothing
but obey the law of necessity, and enter into the beautiful domain
from which they have dissipated the darkness.” This is delightfully
put and is all very true. Latin nomenclature does tend immensely to
dispel confusion, though in certain quarters it may wound the sense of
sentiment, and we shall no doubt always have confirmed adherents of
popular names.

But, however it may be with the use of popular names in England,
I venture to think we have better things to do than to Anglicise
the Alpines in their Swiss home, and that—as says a well-known
botanist—“when English names are coined for species which do not
even occur in Britain, the result is sometimes ridiculous, _e.g._
‘Dodonœus’s French Willow’ for an Epilobium.” And it is not alone
ridiculous: it is often paltry and in the worst of taste, and it will
frequently drive romance and beauty from the Alpine landscape. What
is there æsthetic, or even useful, about “Mignonette-leaved Lady’s
Smock” for _Cardamine resedifolia_; “Neglected Pinkwort” for _Dianthus
neglectus_; “Doronic Groundsel” for _Senecio Doronicum_; or “Glacier’s
Yarrow” for _Achillea nana_? Are not the Latin names truer and more
beautiful? And are they not as easy of retention as their English
substitutes? Shall we say that _Campanula barbata_ is not a truer
title than “Bearded Harebell” for a plant that has nothing of the
English Harebell about it except “family”? Or shall we say that it
is not just as easy, as the botanist already quoted points out, to
remember _Atriplex deltoidea_ as “Deltoid-leaved Orache”? Those who,
advocating English nomenclature to this extent in the Alps, plead the
cause of intelligible simplicity, irresistibly recall the complicated
efforts of those who aim at the Simple Life. And, on the whole, their
efforts are no less ugly.

[Illustration: HAYMAKING at Champex in the middle of July.]

But let us not stand haggling over such contentious matter. _Revenons
à nos moutons!_

Scanning these fields and <DW72>s, noting “the lavish hand of June,”
and remembering that July’s hand will be no whit less lavish, we
realise without any difficulty that there are more than twice as many
flowering plants indigenous to Switzerland as in the whole of the
British Isles. Indeed, June alone could easily convince us of this.
What wealth! One feels that the proper way, the only adequate way of
enjoying it is to abjure hotels and camp out in the midst of it all.
When the meal-time bell rings out from the Hôtel-Pension, one turns
in answer to it with reluctance, declaring:

    “I could be content to see
    June and no variety,
    Loitering here, and living there,
    With a book and frugal fare,
    With a finer gypsy time,
    And a cuckoo in the clime.”

And when the end of June arrives, and with it the Arnica, the Greater
Astrantia, the orange-red Hawkweed, the Burnet butterfly, and the
passage of the bell-decked cows to the higher Alpine pastures—“Liauba!
Liauba! _por alpa!_”—we may tremble for the coming of the scythe.
Already it will be commencing its deadly work 2,000 feet below, and
its advance is rapid and quite regardless of all we flower-lovers may
mutter under our breath, or more probably say aloud. However, we must
be reasonable. Complaints of this description are not in order. The
world must be helped round: hay must be made, and the flowers are not,
and cannot be, our all-in-all. We benefit most by being seasonable;
sufficient for the day is the good thereof; and the good of a day
need not die with the day. We take our fill of these flowers whilst
we reasonably may; recollection does the rest for us in the gap of
seasons. An emotion passed is yet part of our life—our life’s memory;
and, in Meredith’s words,

    “Dead seasons quicken in one petal spot of colour unforgot.”

For enough is far better than a feast. It is one thing to be
spiritually sentimental; it is quite another thing to know where to
draw a right line in spiritual sentiment. Happy the man who is endowed
with the double capacity; happy the man who can allow these flowers
to lift him to a higher plane of being; and then, when reasonableness
begins to flag, turn to his floral cicerones and say with firmness:
“Excuse me, but I must now be getting back to dinner. And you, in
your turn, you know, must be preparing to be dinner for the cows.”

              ─────────────────────────────────

SOME PROMINENT PASTURE FLOWERS IN BLOOM AROUND CHAMPEX, JUNE 15, 1910

  _Ajuga pyramidalis_ (Alpine Bugle).

  _Alchemilla alpina._

    ”  _vulgaris_ (Lady’s Mantle).

  _Anemone narcissiflora._

    ”  _sulphurea._

  _Antennaria dioica_ (Cudweed; Cat’s-ear).

  _Anthericum Liliago._

    ”  _ramosum._

  _Anthyllis vulneraria, forma alpestris_ (Kidney Vetch or
        Ladies’ Fingers).

  _Biscutella lævigata._

  _Campanula rhomboidalis._

    ”  _rotundifolia._

  _Centaurea montana_ (Bluebottle; Knapweed; Mountain Cornflower).

  _Cerastium arvense_ (Field Mouse-ear).

  _Dianthus Carthusianorum_ (Carthusian Pink).

  _Echium vulgare_ (Viper’s Bugloss).

  _Euphrasia alpina._

    ”  _minima_ (Yellow Eyebright).

    ”  _officinalis_ (Eyebright).

  _Geranium sylvaticum_ (Wood Crane’s-bill).

  _Geum rivale_ (Water Avens).

  _Globularia cordifolia._

  _Hippocrepis comosa_ (Horseshoe Vetch).

  _Lathyrus heterophyllus_ (Mountain Everlasting Pea).

    ”  _sylvestris_ (Wood Everlasting Pea).

  _Linum alpinum_ (Alpine Flax).

  _Lotus corniculatus_ (Bird’s-foot Trefoil).

  _Lychnis dioica_ (Wood Campion).

    ”  _Flos-cuculi_ (Ragged Robin).

    ”  _viscaria_ (Red Catchfly).

  _Muscari comosum._

  _Myosotis alpestris_ (Alpine Forget-me-not).

  _Onobrychis viciæfolia_ (Sainfoin).


  ORCHIDS:

      _Cephalanthera ensifolia_ }
                                } Helleborine.
        ”  _rubra_              }

      _Gymnadenia odoratissima_ and _G. conopsea_.

      _Habenaria (Cœloglossum) viridis_ (Frog Orchis).

      _Nigritella nigra (angustifolia)_ (Vanilla Orchis).

      _Orchis latifolia._

        ”  _maculata._

        ”  _ustulata._

      _Plantanthera_ or _Habenaria bifolia_ (Butterfly Orchis).

  _Paradisia Liliastrum_ (Paradise or St. Bruno’s Lily).

  _Pedicularis tuberosa_ (Yellow Lousewort).

  _Phyteuma betonicifolium_ }
                            } Rampion
    ”  _orbiculare_         }

  _Pimpinella magna rosea._

  _Polygala alpestris_ }
                       } Milkwort.
    ”  _vulgaris_      }

  _Polygonum Bistorta_ (Snake-root; Bistort).

    ”_  viviparum_ (Alpine Knotweed).

  _Potentilla rupestris_ (Strawberry-flowered Cinquefoil).

  _Ranunculus aconitifolius_ (Fair Maid of France).

  _Reseda luteola_ (Mignonette; Weld or Dyer’s Weed).

  _Rhinanthus angustifolius_ (Yellow Rattle).

  _Rosa alpina_ (Alpine Brier or Eglantine).

  _Salvia pratensis_ (Meadow Sage; Clary)

  _Scabiosa lucida._

  _Silene inflata_ (Bladder Campion).

  _Trollius europæus_ (Globe-Flower).

  _Valeriana tripteris_ (Trefoil Valerian).




CHAPTER VII

ON FLORAL ATTRACTIVENESS AND COLOUR

    “We, having a secret to others unknown,
    In the cool mountain-mosses,
    May whisper together ...”

                              HENRY KENDALL, _September in Australia_.


Our knowledge of life behind the balder manifestations of life is
as yet so deficient that it would be pure conceit to pretend more
than lightly to suggest certain thoughts that may possibly commence
to explain something of the affinity existing between ourselves and
the flowers. That such an affinity does actually exist there appears
sufficient evidence to warrant our believing, and no one, I imagine,
with an interested eye for these matters, would care to pronounce
against this evidence without making careful reservations. And if this
affinity exists for one it exists for all, though in some, because of
the variable nature of the human mechanism, it is less demonstrable
than in others. Nor does it show itself merely in our admiration and
care for the flowers; there are many instances of its appearing in a
form which borders upon the “uncanny”—a form of that universal and
universally sympathetic subconsciousness which Psychology is doing its
best to investigate.

Thoreau in one of his Essays mentions how that one day he wished to
find a certain rare orchid, but had no idea in which direction to
seek it; and, setting out in this blind state of mind, his steps took
him straight to the very object of his quest. Of course those in whom
prejudice is a more real possession than open-mindedness will dismiss
such evidence as pointing to mere coincidence or to an unmistakable
case of chance. They will say the same, too, of the instance mentioned
by Mr. H. Stuart Thompson in an article, “Ten Days in Co. Kerry,”
which appeared in the _Gardeners’ Chronicle_ for October 22, 1910.
“My companion,” says Mr. Thompson, “makes no claim to be a botanist,
but he has an innate faculty for finding good plants if they are to
be found; and let it be said here that during a ski-ing holiday in
Switzerland last winter he managed to grub up through the snow quite
a wonderful collection of interesting Alpines which are succeeding
capitally on his rockery.” This will also be called coincidence; but
there is, I believe, far less justification for doing so than for
calling it sympathy. Personally, I have more liking for design in
these matters than I have for luck. Surely it were a poor world—nay,
an impossible world—that were governed by chance in whatsoever degree.
Evolution may know no “categorical imperative” and yet be a stranger
to aimless drifting. The law of cause and effect seems to guarantee
this. And is it not also guarantee of a universal sympathy, since the
prime essential of this law is that all things are linked up in one
continuous chain?

[Illustration: The AUTUMN CROCUS in the fields near the village of
Trient, with the Aiguille du Tour in the background, September. ]

My own experience among the flowers biases me in favour of this
sympathetic rule and causes me to believe there is some means by
which our several beings can communicate. On many occasions I have
been led, with seeming intention, to some rare white form that I was
wishing to find. Apparent purposelessness and lack of decision have
filled my mind, and yet, time after time, have I taken the very path,
or have scrambled up the precise trackless <DW72> which has brought me
to the whereabouts of the rarity I have been seeking. On other
occasions I have been arrested in my walk and in the midst of quite
other thoughts of my own or of some conversation with a companion
by an impelling impression that a floral rarity was in my immediate
neighbourhood. I have noticed, too, that this seeming guidance has
invariably happened in connection with white flowers—the white form
of _Rhododendron ferrugineum_, for instance, or of _Gentiana excisa_,
or of _Soldanella alpina_, or of _Viola calcarata_, or of _Aster
alpinus_. It may sound preposterously mystical, but I do really
suspect that I have found these uncommon or rare flowers—perhaps there
was only one specimen within the district for miles round—by something
in their nature being in tune with something in mine. I do not imagine
success would attend upon conscious effort, my own experience being
that the promptings have come without any striving on my part. I have
had most mixed and unconvincing results and many total failures when
experiment has been conducted upon such lines as one might follow
with a water-finder. I am aware that however much in earnest one may
be in speaking of this class of phenomena, it is difficult to appear
reasonable; for the matter is so wrapped in haze. I can only repeat
that the thing has happened to me when I have been least expecting it.

I remember one case in particular, when I was rambling with a friend
upon the rapid <DW72>s of Dent de Bonnavaux, near Champéry. I was
longing to find the white form of _Gentiana asclepiadea_, the Willow
Gentian, about which I had been reading. We had arrived where this
Gentian was growing in profusion in a semi-shade afforded by giant
cliffs, and had proceeded nearly to the foot of the Pas d’Encel,
when, feeling suddenly persuaded that the plant I wanted was near by,
I called a halt. My friend said, “Oh, let’s get on; there’s nothing
here!” But I begged for indulgence. “I feel,” said I, “that the white
form of the blue Gentian is growing hereabouts, and I’m going to hunt
it up.” For some time I scrambled about without the required result,
and I was beginning to suspect that I was being prompted more by a
fussy imagination than an intuitive sympathy; and yet I felt unable
to abandon the search, and determined not to do so until I had gone
all over the ground twice. And then, at last—Eureka! there amongst
the grasses behind a big boulder were two lovely sprays of purest
white! Now, it was not as if this were the first time that I had been
amongst this Gentian; many times before, and in many districts, had I
passed through quantities of it; but never had I seen any variation
except in the depth and brightness of the blue, and never before had
I experienced the sensation of the near presence of its white form.
Nor can I recall any occasion when this sensation has played me false.
Over and over again have I felt it, and with whatever plant it has
been associated it has invariably proved truthfully prophetic. Will
coincidence or luck satisfactorily account for this? I am unable to
think so, though I confess I must exclaim as Faust does:

    “Lo! here I sit no wiser than before”!

But now that we are thus far, let us grope a little further within
the dim-lit domain of subconsciousness; I would fain touch upon a
matter closely allied to the foregoing—that of the significance of
the colour of flowers, and the part played by colour in the sympathy
existing between the flowers and ourselves. Let us first of all
speculate briefly upon the significance of floral colouring. Speaking
vaguely—and who can speak with any very great distinctness?—colour is
one of many manifestations of one and the same fundamental condition.
Sound is another; odour another. Our five senses, in fact, appear to
deal with the self-same set of fundamental truths and to translate
them differently: possibly upon the principle that variety is charming
and is much more likely to arouse our complete inquisitiveness,
ending ultimately in our thorough appreciation, than would these
vital truths if brought to our notice in just a single form. There
are people to whom odours represent colours; there are others to whom
Wagnerian music is largely  by scarlet and all other reds,
and to whom the note of the blackbird is magenta and purple, and that
of the greenfinch yellow. There is, too, a case recorded by the late
Professor Lombroso, where a girl could see things with the tip of her
nose; Miss Helen Keller, blind, deaf, and dumb, can feel if a person
is dark or fair; and it is said that recently in Germany there was
a man who, having undergone an operation upon his head, was, after
recovery, obliged to seek the peace and comfort of a dark cellar on
fine days, because he could hear the sun shining. Without staking the
soundness of my argument upon this last quotation, there would seem
enough evidence in the world to assure us that our senses deal with
one and the same set of realities, and that colour, sound, and odour
have birth in a self-same cause. What, then, are these realities;
what, then, is this cause in relation with ourselves and the flowers;
and what part does colour play therein?

Of course, I am supposing that colour is really in the flowers and
not in us or in the bee, as was suggested a few years ago by an
American _savant_. I am unable to think that either myself or a bee
can determine the white form of some blue Gentian, some rose-pink
Ononis (Rest-Harrow), or some yellow Primrose. If colour is not in
the flower, then neither is it in a lady’s dress, nor in a nation’s
flag, nor in a picture. What reason should the world and his wife
have for unanimously declaring a dress to be brown and purple if, in
reality, it is no colour at all—if, that is to say, it is black, or
the highest refinement of black, which is white? How comes it that
a whole nation with one accord looks upon its flag as a combination
of red, white, and blue when, in reality, it is simply a design in
black and white? What are we doing by painting our hives a variety of
bright colours in order to lead the bees safely home, if paint is no
colour and bees can colour the hives as they will? It is beyond me; I
imagine it is beyond my readers; and I suspect that if the truth were
known it was even beyond the American _savant_ in his less imaginative
moments. Maybe things are not what they seem, but can this be possible
to the extent implied by our Western cousin? I know, of course,
that we do largely befool ourselves; I know that in part measure we
are “All valiant dust that builds on dust”; but I cannot believe we
befool ourselves to the extent of painting pictures every imaginable
tint when, really and truly, all this colour is in ourselves. I,
personally, am old-fashioned enough to think that when I squeeze
gamboge out upon my palette I undoubtedly have there a yellow, not a
colourless pigment. And I imagine that a bee thinks the same when he
flies, as frequently he will, head-foremost into it, believing it to
be a buttercup or a marigold.

Yes, I am presuming that we human beings, endowed though we are with
abundant powers of which we are greatly unconscious, have little
enough to do with a flower’s being mauve or orange; and it is upon
this possibly antiquated and false understanding that I ask myself,
What tale has the colour of flowers to tell us? In the first place,
I am not sure that I am content to see white appearing solely between
yellow and pink in Dr. Percy Groom’s scale of floral colour; the scale
does not look quite true, running in the following order: yellow,
white, pink, red, crimson, violet, blue. I should be more content if
the order ran like this: white, blue, green, yellow, orange, red,
violet, blue, white; for scales such as these, if continued, form a
circle, a complete and continuous whole. They cannot rightly be cut
up into abrupt sections of straight lines if they are to tell the
whole truth. The green flowers appear to stand as proof of this, for
they draw their tint from both extremities of the scale—from blue,
the highest of primal colours, and from yellow, the lowest; they link
up the extremities and complete the circle; they have no definite
qualities, but are at once high and lowly.

If we start with the lowliest of flowers of clean-cut individuality,
it must be with the yellow ones; and yellow stands for the dawn of
definite life. After that, for flowers of distinct position, we must
go to the red ones, those of orange tints being intermediary; and
with red we reach the fulfilment of animal or worldly vigour. From
this point onwards, through magenta, lilac, mauve, violet, purple,
refinement is increasingly marked until blue is reached. Then blue,
starting darkly, advances to “Cambridge” tints, and so into white.

Now white is the “colour” of which we know the least—and talk the
most. Really, it indicates nothing—that which is as “a bunghole
without a barrel round it”—and of this, naturally, we can have but a
very inaccurate appreciation. We speak glibly about white, and we soar
with it to giddy, dreamy heights, but we speak and mostly dream of
colour not of white. For—

    “Life, like a dome of many- glass,
    Stains the white radiance of eternity.”

We talk of snow as if it were of no colour; but we are able to talk
about it only because it is so colour-full. We talk arrogantly of
ourselves as “white people,” and we are able to do so because we are
not white people, but people with a rude amount of red in us—“animals
with red cheeks,” as Nietzsche calls us; indeed, it is possible that
the <DW64> has more right to call himself a white man, for he is nearer
to black than we are to white, and, according to the well-known
formula, “Black is white, white is black, and black is no colour
at all.”

[Illustration: _ANEMONE SULPHUREA_ and _GENTIANA EXCISA_, painted
directly in the fields at the end of May. ]

But what part does white play amongst the flowers? To begin with,
I believe we have no right to restrict it to one particular
place—between yellow and red. It would seem to have no precise
position in the scale, for it is found appearing here, there, and
everywhere along the line. It occurs amongst all colours, but if it
has one more permanent place than another, that place is outside
the line of colour altogether; and white, as a permanency, is an
extreme. The appearance of a white form is often hailed as a case
of anæmia in the  type; and no doubt this is so frequently,
though it cannot be so always. Where a white form is the issue of
a blue type-flower, such as a Gentian or a Campanula, it is most
probable that it is a case of natural evolution, and that such a white
plant is no more anæmic than is anything which arrives naturally,
progressively, upon the higher plane of being. We of a lower plane
are not a little apt to regard as weaklings things which emerge upon
the higher plane. Certainly a white flower is not necessarily “too
good to live.” If it be issue of a blue type-flower, it is more likely
than not to be in every way well bred. Where, however, it is issue
of a yellow or a red type-flower, then I think we are justified in
suspecting anæmia, for yellow or red must pass through blue before it
can healthily and with all warrant emerge as white. There are no leaps
in progressive evolution; soundness is sequence.

Now in no instance, I think, have I been influenced by the unknown
presence of yellow or of red as I have by that of white and sometimes
of blue flowers. Why should this be: why should the influence of white
be more remarkable than that of yellow? Is it not probable that in
special cases the human organism is in pronouncedly sympathetic accord
with the organism of flowers, in some such way as there is sympathetic
attunement between transmitter and receiver in wireless telegraphy?
Is it not possible that some natures are attuned to blue and white
flowers, and will ignore yellow or red ones, while other natures are
in accord with yellow or red flowers and are unresponsive to blue and
white ones? I know of a judge at local flower shows who invariably,
and without much demur, gave first prize to the table decoration
containing scarlet; and if such a decoration was mainly composed
of the Oriental Poppy it secured the top award without a moment’s
hesitation. Is it not possible that this judge was in sympathetic
attune with scarlet; is it not possible that, were he to have been
blindfolded, and set down in a field of blue Cornflowers with one red
Poppy hidden away amongst them, he would at once have been persuaded
of the Poppy’s presence?

Thus we end upon a question mark. But let us not feel abashed. “A
man is wise,” says Oliver Goldsmith, “while he continues in pursuit
of wisdom, but when he once fancies that he has found the object of
his inquiry he then becomes a fool.” Let us find comfort in this
dictum, and confess that we have discovered scarcely a trace of that
for which we have been inquiring. Cardinal Newman once observed that
men know less of animals than they do of angels, and I think we may
safely put the flowers by the side of the animals—especially when our
knowledge deals, as it has here been dealing, with that mysterious
subconsciousness which is the domain of angels. Familiarity is the
much-travelled road to ignorance. We often deny to familiar things
qualities that we stoutly insist belong to things of which we know
really nothing. The flowers are too obvious, too near to us to share
the intimacy in which we live with things hidden and secret. Even we
ourselves suffer in this manner, and we deny to ourselves qualities we
“see” and “know” in what we cannot see and do not know. What a very
curious blend of contradictions we are! In one and the same breath we
will unduly belaud and unduly belittle ourselves; but we are no more
the restricted creatures of our fancy than we are the centre and hub
of the universe. Although, manifestly short-sighted, we stumble about
in most awkward fashion, still we are delicately receptive of subtle,
moving influences. We are instruments of far-reaching powers, but we
look upon ourselves as freer agents than the case warrants. We imagine
we go here and go there entirely of our own volition, yet if we were
really such lonely automatons as this we should be immeasurably more
stupid than we are.

It must not surprise us, then, if Science some day convinces us that
both in thought and in action we are moved by many things with which
we now say we have no connection, and that amongst these things will
be found the flowers; it must not astonish us if such a phrase as “The
Call of the Wild” is possessed of an intrinsic meaning, the fulness
and scope of which we now consider it an eccentric folly to admit.
There is a wondrous education in store for us. We are, actually, in
our right place, but we know little of how or why. When some day our
eyes are opened more widely to the forces that direct our lives, we
shall be humbler than at present. But we shall be happier. And I
venture to predict that few things will help more materially towards
this greater happiness than will a real and knowing intimacy with the
flowers.




CHAPTER VIII

THE RHODODENDRON

    “Wonderful, hidden things wait near, I know,
    Perchance fulfilment of our noblest aim,
    Or marvels that would set the heart aflame,
    Which an obscure and mystic sense might show—
    Snatching us—in a moment—to the glow
    Beyond yon filmy barrier without name
    That no eye pierceth!”

                      FANNY ELIZABETH SIDEBOTTOM, _A Spiritual Sense_.


According to authority, there are about 186 species of Rhododendron in
the world. The greatest number of varieties inhabit India and China,
and they are important plants in the Caucasus, where often—as with
_Rhododendron ponticum_—they cover the entire side of a mountain.
In Switzerland there are but two varieties, _R. ferrugineum_ and
_R. hirsutum_, and they are to the Swiss Alps what the Heather is
to the Scottish mountains (with, however, this difference—the Alps
have also the Heather). They clothe the open mountain-side with a
deep evergreen growth, invading the lichen-scored rocks and even
the pine-forests, and robing themselves, from mid-June to mid-July,
in such rosy-red attire as fascinates even the accustomed peasant,
causing him almost as much delight as they cause the stranger. Indeed,
their flowering is a masterpiece of Nature’s art, and few things are
more fitting the sun’s ascendency and the advent of cowbells upon the
pastures. Wherever on the fields there is a rock, there shines the
rosy shrub against the grey mass, and the steep <DW72>s glint and glow
as they will do in the autumn when the Bilberry and other groundlings
catch afire. I have met visitors in disappointment at the smallness
of the blossoms, and inquiring where the large-flowered forms of our
gardens might be found. Certainly, these plants are not those of the
Himalaya, but I warrant they can boast a glory all their own—one
inspired by its particular circumstance and surroundings, and vying in
that respect with the glory of the kinsfolk of India or of the Azalea
in Afghanistan. Abundance rather than size is the keynote of this
present splendour; and the abundance is amazing, giving us a mass of
colour which larger individual flowers could scarcely rival.

Wet or fine the glow abides, but in fine weather its rich brilliance
is certainly of summer’s best and goes far to reconcile us to the
lost glories of the Vernal Gentian. There can be few more satisfying
recollections of early summer days than when, waist-deep amid the
Rhododendrons overgrowing some ancient rock-fall, one gazed across
a rosy expanse, sparingly broken by grey boulder and blasted pine
and falling away towards the snout of some sea-green glacier backed
by snow-draped crags and _aiguilles_, with, in the foreground,
on occasional turfy intervals, groups of orange Arnica and of
_Gymnadenia albida_, the Small Butterfly Orchids, close consort of
the Rhododendron, whilst the Swallow-tail and Alpine Clouded-Yellow
butterflies flirted with the blossoms and chased each other in the
thin, clear air and joy-inspiring sunlight. “The Alpine Rhododendron
... once gave me,” Mr. George Yeld tells us in his chapter contributed
to the Rev. W. A. B. Coolidge’s “The Alps in Nature and in History,”
“one of the most effective sights in the flower-world that I can
recall. I came upon it in a late season—acres of _Rhododendron
ferrugineum_, in a forest where the trees grew at some distance
apart. The brightness of the colour—a rich red—the extent of the
flower show, the setting of pines, and the background of stately
ramparts of rock, with an occasional waterfall, made the scene unique;
and the memory of it is proportionately vivid.” Scarce can such
experience need enlargement along the line of pleasure, and surely
no well-regulated mind will wander in search of larger-flowered
varieties! Such scenes are satisfaction itself—except that they play
upon some secret human chord, awaken “an obscure and mystic sense” and
waft inquisitive mentality

                        “to the glow
    Beyond yon filmy barrier without name
    That no eye pierceth!”

[Illustration: _PRIMULA FARINOSA_, _GENTIANA VERNA_, Micheli’s Daisy,
_BARTSIA ALPINA_, _POLYGALA ALPINA_, and the two Pinguiculas or
Butterworts, painted directly in the fields at the end of May. ]

       *       *       *       *       *

The Rhododendron is commonly spoken and written of as the Alpine
Rose; but it is a member of the Heath family, and not of that family
which fable says was created by Bacchus. This is a ready instance of
where popular nomenclature, without discipline, leads to confusion;
for there is an Alpine Rose (_Rosa alpina_), a very lovely rich
magenta- Eglantine often growing cheek-by-jowl with the
pseudo _Alpenrose_ of the Germans. It is quite possible that the word
“Rose” really springs—as in _Monte Rosa_—from _roisa_ or _roësa_,
meaning “glacier” in the ancient patois of the valley of Aosta, and
I have several times seen this more than suggested by authorities in
etymology. The fact remains, however, that the Rhododendron has become
a rose and has thus obscured to some extent the repute and worth of
the real Alpine Rose. In French, the Rhododendron, though it is often
known as _Rose des Alpes_, is sometimes spoken of as _Rue des Alpes_
and _Rosage_.

The Rhododendron is the Swiss national flower. Nor am I sure but that
this honour is not borne almost entirely by _R. ferrugineum_. This is
far more widespread than is _hirsutum_, being far less difficult in
its likes and dislikes. For example, notwithstanding that _hirsutum_
loves limestone, it shuns the Jura Mountains, whereas _ferrugineum_
is common in the Jura, though usually it is shy of lime. And if the
honours really are undivided, they seem to be won by superior aptness,
and the laurel-wreath rests, I think, upon the more appropriate brow.
For, of the two, _ferrugineum_ best typifies the Swiss national
character—masculine sturdiness, common-sensed sanity, void of fine
fastidiousness. The whole habit of _ferrugineum_ is more robust,
more rigid, more resistant. It seeks small clemency; it has, so to
speak, its teeth set, prepared to front the rudest buffets of Alpine
circumstance without a prayer for pity, and to come up smiling in
spite of all. Although, of course, _hirsutum_ has its own good way of
overcoming severe conditions, it has a greater delicacy of bearing and
does not impress one as being possessed of its cousin’s rugged nature.

Eugène Rambert, the Swiss poet-alpinist, speaks of the Rhododendron as
being “_la plante alpine par excellence_” and in doing so he probably
uses the word “Alpine” in the same sense in which we ourselves are
here using it, or else perhaps he refers to the plant as, for the
most part, it is resident in Switzerland. For on the Italian face of
the Alps the Rhododendron descends, as around Lugano, to the plains.
Mr. Stuart Thompson, who has made a special study of altitude in
connection with the mountain flora, says in his “Alpine Plants of
Europe” that _R. ferrugineum_ “ascends to 8,800 feet in Valais, to at
least 8,200 feet in the Maritime Alps, and descends into the plain in
Tessin by Lago Maggiore (with _R. hirsutum_), and by Lake Wallenstadt,
and it is occasionally found as a glacier relic in turbaries in the
woods of the Swiss plateau.”

Mr. Thompson, by mentioning the fact of the remains of Rhododendron
being found in peat deposits on the plains, gives us a glimpse of
this plant slowly retreating up the mountains with the glaciers. And
yet, on the south side of the Alps, it is still to be found upon the
plains! This is one of the mysteries of Alpine plant-life, and one for
which I have seen no satisfactory theory. _Gentiana verna_ shows us, I
believe, the same seeming inconsistency, descending to the sea-coast
in Ireland, yet rarely, if ever, found below 1,300 feet in Switzerland.

Like the English Dog Rose—and this, perhaps, is its greatest likeness
to a Rose—the Rhododendron develops galls (Oak-apples or Robin’s
Pincushions, as they are called in England) upon its leaves. Some
of these are produced by insects and some by a fungus (_Exobasidium
rhododendri_), the latter gall being yellow, and turning pink or rose
on the sunny side. The leaves and flowers are used in infusion for
rheumatism; also as an ingredient of Swiss tea. This shrub, too, is
the food-plant of one of the handsomest of Alpine butterflies, _Colias
Palæno_, a Clouded-Yellow—anything but clouded, though it lives where
clouds are born, for with its clear citron wings boldly bordered with
jet-black and rimmed with tender rose, it is a bright, true child of
high altitudes.

Nor should the Rhododendron be forgotten as a subject for our gardens.
When raised from layers or from seed, it takes quite kindly to our
climate. Indeed, the plants at “Floraire,” M. Henry Correvon’s
charming garden near Geneva, come from England—a fact that will sound
much in line with that of living at Brighton and receiving one’s fish
from London! This anomaly, in the case of the Rhododendron, is due to
the great difficulty of acclimatising the plant to the Swiss plains.
When, however, it has once been acclimatised in England it will
transplant to Switzerland with the greatest success. I cannot remember
ever to have seen in Switzerland a successfully transplanted native
plant of Rhododendron, even though, as is frequently the case around
mountain hotels, it has been a question of moving it only some few
yards from where it was growing wild. These wild plants have a strong
objection to being tamed. But in England’s humid climate it is quite
easy to cultivate, and if fields are to be added to our rockworks the
Rhododendron must have a place in them—a place around the solitary
rocks, a place with the Daphne and the shrubby Honeysuckles.

       *       *       *       *       *

With what fecundity of resource Nature marshals her forces; with what
amazing ingenuity she passes to her goal! As if to show her wayward
child how academic strictness in one straight line is not the road to
greatest success, she takes a thousand ways to reach one and the same
end, causing extremes and opposites in method to give a common high
result. And this she does on every hand, and in all of her domains.
In the world with which we are now dealing—the plant-world—she is
particularly rich in ways and means. See how, for example, some
flowers need the wind to assist them to propagate their kind, and note
the many ways such flowers have of courting the wind’s assistance;
see how others need the bees and flies to busy themselves about them,
and note the many ways such have of attracting the attentions of bees
and flies; see how some will call in a beetle to eat his way to their
hearts, whilst others will just hob-nob together, independent of any
intermediary. See, again, how some plants bury their roots in the
earth for sustenance, whilst others, with like object, will bury them
in the air; see, too, how some will climb by the help of their thorns,
whilst others will do so by the aid of tendrils, or of rootlets, or of
adhering fingers. An admirably efficient way of achieving a purpose
does not preclude the possibility of there being a score or more other
and equally efficient ways of achieving the same purpose. One species
of Orange-tree may carry its seed in the core of its fruit, whilst
another may carry it in a special exterior annexe; or one species of
Mangrove-tree may breathe by means of its leaves, whilst another may
do so by means of tube-like organs thrown up through the soft mud.

It seems strange we should be so strictly narrow in our outlook,
surrounded as we are by so much clearly demonstrated resourcefulness;
it seems strange that all day long our dogmatic finger should point
here, then there, and the presumptuous cry go up, “_This_ is the only
right and proper way!” It seems strange: for it is thus a person is
a savage in our eyes if, instead of wearing ornaments in his ears,
he wears them in his nose and lips. To be sure, we are improving in
this respect, for at one time we readily burnt people who had another
way of doing things. But there is still vast room for progress. And,
surely, it is no fond trick of the imagination to believe that an
appreciable amount of this room will gradually be appropriated to
progress made through Nature Study. For Nature is too far-sighted to
be dogmatic, too capable to be academic; she leaves an illimitable
margin for what is right, incidentally giving a complete exposition of
the truth of our much employed, but much neglected adage, “All roads
lead to Rome.”

Now, in these two Swiss Rhododendrons there is excellent occasion
for noting two very different means of offering highly effective
resistance to a common foe. The foe is drought—the drought of the
hot, ungenerous, porous moraine, and of the rapid, rocky, sun-baked,
wind-swept <DW72>. Mountain circumstance, such as is affected for the
most part by these Rhododendrons, is the outcome of comparatively
recent disturbance; soil is in the forming, and what there is of it
but thinly coats a tumbled bed of crevassed rocks and boulders. Casual
observation may lead visitors to suppose the Swiss Alpine climate to
be by no means devoid of moisture and to be liable at all seasons to
its fair share of damp, all-enveloping cloud and fog, and to storms of
snow and rain. And casual observation will be right. But no section
of the globe’s face is more thoroughly and more promptly drained than
that of the Alps, and a “deluge” of rain is like so much water
on a duck’s back. Hence, an incomparable system of drainage is one of
the prime disabilities against which Alpine vegetation has to contend.
And the Rhododendrons meet this disability in two ways—_ferrugineum_
with hard leaves, varnished above, and felted and resinous beneath;
_hirsutum_ with softer, pliant leaves fringed by hairs. Thus do both
fence ably the evil of too rapid evaporation; thus do both, by their
diverse methods, give to the student

    “The subtle hintings of a perfect whole.”

[Illustration: _GENTIANA VERNA_, the type-plant, and some of its
forms. ]




CHAPTER IX

THE JULY FIELDS

    “Through rich green solitudes,
    And wildly hanging woods
    With blossoms and with bell,
    In rich redundant swell,
                And the pride
    Of the mountain daisy there,
    And the forest everywhere,
    With the dress and with the air
                Of a bride.”

                                        DUNCAN BAN MACINTYRE.


Amid the brilliant floral gathering which crowds into the arena of
the Alps upon the blazoned entry of July, one marks no sign of the
fair and frail St. Bruno’s Lily. Nor is this as it should not be.
Dainty to the point of extreme delicacy, this flower of Paradise is
justly of a season more restrained, and one should not heap regrets
upon its absence from so flamboyant a concourse as this present. The
rich-blue Bell Gentian is likewise absent from the gay and jostling
crowd, having at last vanished from the shadier nooks where, in fond
persistency, it has been continuing the cult of spring. But these two
precious field-flowers form, possibly, the sum of June’s distinguished
absentees.

    “Why fret about them if to-day be sweet!”

And, surely, to-day is as sweet as ever yesterday was! The glory of
the Bistort is not yet on the wane, and to it the tall Buttercup has
wedded its lustre, and _Ranunculus aconitifolius_, the Fair Maid of
France; consequently, the moister meadows are a knee-deep wealth of
pink, yellow, and white. On the drier fields, too, the rich blue
and mauve expanses of Salvia and Geranium are now reinforced by the
crowded blue bells of _Campanula rhomboidalis_, and hosts of the
mauve-blossomed Scabious; while upon the <DW72>s the now declining
Biscutella and Strawberry-flowered Potentilla have for new companions
_Hieracium alpinum_, _Hypochœris maculata_, _Crepis aurea_, _Campanula
barbata_, and _C. Scheuchzeri_, the tall lemon-yellow _Hypochœris
uniflora_, and the lilac _Gentiana campestris_. The tall blue and
tall white _Phyteuma betonicæfolium_, and the blue, round-headed _P.
orbiculare_ are everywhere, and have been joined by the tall blue
_P. Micheli_ and the little blue _P. hemisphæricum_ of onion-like
leaves. The Orchids, also everywhere, are still in full beauty, their
numbers having been swelled by the arrival of _Gymnadenia albida_.
The stately _Veratrum album_ is in flower, companioning the equally
stately Yellow Gentian, to which, in habit and foliage, though not in
blossom, it bears a strong resemblance. The Arnica, also, is coming
into bloom: the tall, red-brown Martagon Lily is fast filling out its
buds; the Yellow Rattle and Anthyllis are ubiquitous; the graceful
Thesium, with sprays of olive- stems and leaves and tiny white
stars (and ugly English name of Bastard Toadflax), is looking its
daintiest; and hosts of Ox-eyed Marguerites and pink Umbelliferæ top
the meadows far and wide. On the rough banks and edges of the fields,
or on the rocks that so often crop up in these pastures, _Saponaria
ocymoides_, _Helianthemum alpestre_, _Calamintha alpina_, _Veronica
saxatilis_, and _Silene rupestris_ add respectively their bright pink,
orange-yellow, mauve, blue, and white abundance to the radiance of the
field-flowers proper. In “the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling
well-spring,” _Myosotis palustris_ is opening its myriad blue eyes;
the Bartsia lingers by “the flower-lit stream” and is joined by the
tiny bright blue _Gentiana nivalis_, here and there showing its rarer
white form; whilst up upon the mountain-sides, backing and dominating
the whole of this crowded, gay array, the Rhododendron is fast putting
forth its red, amazing fulness.

If June be reckoned as a millionaire, then surely July must also,
and with the additional prefix “multi”! “It is with flowers as with
men,” says Major Reginald Rankin in “The Royal Ordering of Gardens,”
and “Providence is on the side of big battalions.” And, of a truth,
this is so in these fields; bigger battalions it would indeed be hard
to find. Is there not here some striking suggestion of an element
in ultimate beauty—that of an harmonious brotherhood? One certainly
seems to catch a glimpse of that economic state where individuality
is general rather than particular; where personality is absorbed by
the mass, and beauty is conspicuous only in the whole; where, so to
speak, the red neckties of leadership do not flare out in designed
and conscious isolation. Among themselves plants have their likes
and dislikes. It is well known that, for example, certain flowers
are only found in the company of Corn, and it is said that in the
kitchen-garden the Radish simply detests the Thyme. But here, on these
meadows, all trace of discord seems lost in one great accord, and the
plants, both great and small, blue-blooded and plebeian,

    “A social commerce hold, and firm support
    The full adjusted harmony of things.”

And what pageantry it all is; what consummate pageantry! “The flowers
are at their Bacchanals!” The Old Mother, unlike many other parents,
is not outdistanced by her children. Though man be loath to admit it,
she holds the lead, and sets him both pace and tune. What are his
pageants beside the pageantry of this his age-full parent? He summons
up his past for glory, and, rightly or wrongly, sees magnificence
only in what he has been; but his old mother, as here on these fairy
fields, seeks naught further than the present. Were it not well that
he read in this the lesson: “Nature must once more become his home, as
it is the home of the animals and angels”? Were it not well that he
should shift his ground and thus amend his outlook? Scarcely does it
befit him to brag about

    “Nature’s fair, fruitless, aimless world
    Men take and mould at will!”

“Fruitless, aimless world”? Why, willy-nilly, Nature moulds _him_—even
by allowing him to think he is moulding _her_.

Behold these meadows! Will he take them and mould them to anything
better than they are? No, he certainly will not. Will he give them an
aim higher than they possess at present? Possibly. There is, however,
only one way by which he may succeed: let him unbend, and let him
gather these meadows closer to his heart and understanding: let him
transport what he can of them to his parks and gardens. But let him
not for one moment imagine that by so doing he is “moulding” them;
for, indubitably, it is they who will be moulding him.

And for this reason: Alpine fields are such superlatively true art
that he cannot but find in them, as in all true art, a common ground
of interest, fellowship, happiness, advancement; “a means”—as Tolstoi
says of true art—“of union among men, joining them together in the
same feelings”—feelings that must ameliorate, must refine.

       *       *       *       *       *

We are now nearing the dread but necessary moment when the scythe
will be laying low the flowers; but ere the arrival of this careful,
callous friend of the cows, we have a few more hours in which to cast
another greedy look around. The Bistort and Buttercup, Orchid and
tall Rampion, have become, or are fast becoming, dingy and seed-full,
but there are several handsome and interesting newcomers; and many of
these subjects, such as the Martagon Lily and Field Gentian, which
at the commencement of the month had only a bloom or two open here
and there, are now at perfection. The red _Centaurea uniflora_ is a
vivid object among the grasses: a “distinct advance,” as nurserymen
would say, upon _C. scabiosa_, our common Hard-heads or Knobweed,
blooming beside it. The sturdy Brown Gentian (_Gentiana purpurea_)
and its near relation, the cream- or greenish-yellow _G.
punctata_, are conspicuous objects, and _Hieracium aurantiacum_,
the fiery, orange-red Hawkweed or Grimm the Collier, burns as a
jewel among them. _Astrantia major_, the Great Masterwort, unique
and charming—more particularly when its flower-heads take on their
truly Alpine tint of rosy magenta—is here with its little brother,
_A. minor_, pale and fragile, perhaps from its habit of living in
shadier places than _major_. The Campanulas are glorious, and
the lilac pyramidal heads of _C. spicata_ are striking “bits of
colour” where the grass is sparser. So also are the lovely deep-blue,
pea-like masses of _Vicia onobrychioides_, associating with Rampion,
Arnica, and Martagon or Turk’s-cap Lily. _Dianthus superbus_ spreads
a lace-like mantle of pink and white over the shadier portions of
the fields by the forest’s edge; and _D. sylvestris_ is a glory of
flesh-pink upon the hotter <DW72>s by the rocks. _Aconitum Napellus_,
blue Monkshood or _Char de Venus_, is not hereabouts as on the
higher pastures; neither are the yellow and orange pea-like _Orobus
luteus_ and that curious Bellflower, _Campanula thyrsoides_, with
its stumpy hollow stem surmounted by a close-set mass of washed-out
yellow flowers; nor is the handsome large-flowered yellow Foxglove
(_Digitalis ambigua_) so plentiful in the Jura Mountains and in other
limestone districts. But _Thalictrum aquilegifolium_, most seductive
of the Meadowrues, raises its soft-lilac or cream-white plumes—often
beside the majestic cream-white plumes of _Spiræa Aruncus_, Queen of
the Fields—in luxuriant hollows where dwell bushes of Alpine Eglantine
and Honeysuckle. In these rich, grassy hollows, too, are noble plants
of the sticky, yellow _Salvia glutinosa_, or Jupiter’s Distaff; the
tall mauve _Mulgedium alpinum_, the _Laitue des Alpes_ or Alpine
Lettuce of the French; the equally tall red _Adenostyles albifrons_;
and the Lesser Foxglove (_Digitalis lutea_), with dark, shiny
foliage and packed spikes of pale yellow blossoms. The orange-yellow
Leopard’s-Bane, _Senecio Doronicum_, and the pink and white _Valeriana
montana_, are upon the dry, turfy banks; and down upon the lower
<DW72>s, among the shrubs or out in the sun-baked open, is a brilliant
concourse of yellow _Ononis natrix_, pink _O. rotundifolia_ (here
and there white in form), blue, Thrift-like _Jasione montana_,
tall, rich-blue, open-flowered _Campanula persicifolia_, and pure
yellow, red-stamened _Verbascum phlomoides_, finest of the Mulleins.
Intense-blue clumps of Hyssop enliven the hot, shaly spaces; and here,
too, is _Linum tenuifolium_, a Flax with delicate lilac flowers;
the Golden Thistle (_Carlina vulgaris_), which, with the white _C.
acaulis_, is so useful for winter decoration: the exquisite pink and
white rambling Vetch, _Coronilla varia_; and _Dianthus sylvestris_
and _D. Carthusianorum_ are wellnigh everywhere in pink and red
abundance—the latter sometimes running to so deep and fiery a shade as
to be found worthy of the additional name of _atrorubens_.

[Illustration: _GERANIUM SYLVATICUM_, _POTENTILLA RUPESTRIS_,
_CENTAUREA MONTANA_, the pink Bistort, the little Alpine Bistort,
painted on the spot in the fields at the beginning of July. ]

Truly, this is a “sun-kissed land of plenty,” with July blazoned in
tones of utmost triumph! Yet harmony, restraint, refinement, have not
in any way been sacrificed. Our sense of this is so acute that when we
return to the plains, the gardens and their gorgeous burdens are apt
to jar upon us, as will vulgarity or a flagrant want of taste.

After some three months spent in intimacy with these <DW72>s and
fields, go down to the swallow’s summer quarters—to Martigny, or
elsewhere on the plain—and mark the Zinnias and French Marigolds,
Asters and Sweet-Williams, and the flaming beds of Petunias, Salvias,
and Geraniums. Mark how gross seems all this “cultivation” after the
Alpine wildness. You are at once constrained to ask yourself. What is
there derogatory in wildness if to be cultivated is to be as these
garden flowers? You see at once more clearly than possibly you ever
saw before that, after all, refinement is largely a relative quantity,
and that even the Rose, Dean Hole’s “Queen Rosa,” can appear coarse
after you have spent a season with the Gentian.

And perhaps it is this feeling that can account in some measure
for our habit of isolating all Alpines upon rockworks. Perhaps it
prompts us to treat them with special deference; and though we will
not, cannot deny the Balsam, or the Tropeolum, or the Cactus Dahlia
our loudest acclamations; though we keep for these and suchlike
products of cultivation a proud place in our affections, hailing
them as familiars allied most intimately to our ordinary, worldly
natures,—though, I say, we hold this grosser, gaudier vegetation
with loving tenacity to our hearts, yet is our rarer self in instant
touch with these Alpine wild-flowers, and, as it were, conducts them
honourably to a shrine apart.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Aster and the Edelweiss are now in bloom above us, and we are
“list’ning with nice distant ears” to the chime of the cattle-bells,
wind-wafted from the higher pastures, half wishing it were our
business to climb. We could, if we would, be again with the youth of
the year; for one of the delightful possibilities of Alpine residence
is to be able to follow spring and summer well into the heart of
autumn. But this year we dare not; our task is to watch these half-way
fields to the end of the floral seasons. Nor is our lot a hard one.
Though flower-land hereabouts is now nearly a dream of yesterday,
yet have we much that can still hold us to the spot, enchanted and
instructed; though for some few days past the fields have seen their
best, and are now for the most part spacious park-like pleasaunces of
yellowish-green, yet have we still the famous setting of

              “... dreaming mountains,
    Lifted from the world together”;

yet have we still the vast, irreproachable arena which, there is no
gainsaying, has helped towards the deep and lasting impression we have
gathered from the meadows.

Over yonder, towering high above the Grand St. Bernard road, and
reflected snow for snow and precipice for precipice in the placid
waters of the lake, is the Grand Combin, one of the noblest units of
“those great constellations of snow-peaks which Nature has massed, in
splendid and prodigal confusion,” in this part of Switzerland; away,
at the end of the Val Ferret, are the white and graceful lines of the
Grand Golliaz, flanked on the near side by the _massif_ of Saleinaz,
and on the further side by the Groupe du Grand Saint-Bernard;
while, immediately above us, suffused with the red of the flowering
Rhododendron, are the steep and rocky masses of the Breyaz, the
Clocher d’Arpette, and the Catogne, that curious mountain that can be
seen from Vevey and Lausanne, a sugarloaf-like cone, blocking the very
centre of the Rhône Valley.

What a happy thing it is that in this neighbourhood the mountains are
reminiscent of nothing except their own giant individualities. How
vexing when this is otherwise—when, I mean, there is a lion rock, or
a weeping woman, or a head of Napoleon in the landscape; as when Mark
Twain discovered that one of the aiguilles flanking Mont Blanc “took
the shapely, clean-cut form of a rabbit’s head.” At Château d’Oex, for
instance, the outline of the Gummfluh is a really creditable profile
likeness of the great Gladstone with his collar, and that of the Rubli
next door presents the profile of O’Connell, the Irish patriot. Apart
from the damage inflicted upon the landscape by the intrusion of
party politics, such huge examples of Nature’s unconscious incursions
into portraiture, when once they have made themselves plain, become a
distressing obsession; and especially is this so for the artist who
attempts to paint these mountains without producing a puzzle-picture.
Fortunately, there are some places which up to the present seem to
know nothing of such untoward resemblances in their surroundings;
fortunately, there are some beauty-spots which have so far escaped the
eye with the disturbing gift of “seeing forms” in clouds and trees and
whatnot; and Champex is one such. At Champex we may rest and dream
without fear of our indulgence degenerating into a nightmare.

But this is not such a season for dreaming as was the spring; we are
far more of the world than we were when the Vernal Gentian, that
“turquoise lighting a ground of green,” was heralding all that is now
so rapidly falling before the scythe. Yet it must not be supposed
that these fields have lost all power to nourish or stimulate the
imagination. The configuration and nature of the ground are so varied
that haymaking is a more lengthy and irregular operation than it is
upon the plains. We have only to turn to the ousy land where the
Grass-of-Parnassus[1] opens its white, green-veined, Ranunculus-like
flowers among the large, rich-blue bells of _Campanula Scheuchzeri_
and the tall, paler blue spikes of _Polemonium cœruleum_, the
well-known Jacob’s Ladder of our gardens; or to the drier stretches
where the Heather is just tinting its olive-green branches with a
suspicion of rose, and the Rampions, Arnica, Hieracium, and Brown
Gentian are mingling with the warm grey, feathery seed-heads of
_Anemone sulphurea_. Here we find the flowers and butterflies as
numerous and as gay as ever; here among the grasses is _Banagna
Atrata_, the little dull-black moth with white-tipped wings,
seeking sanctuary from the devastating work of the reapers; _Zygœna
carniolica_, one of the most distinct and fascinating of the bright
Burnet butterflies, a stranger to England, greedily absorbed upon the
flowers of the Scabious; numberless Fritillaries, speeding hither
and thither, their burnished pearl-backed wings flashing in the
sunlight,—here, in fact, we have summer at its height, uninjured,
undisturbed—a place, as Walden was, where we may “transact some
private business with the fewest obstacles.”

[1] The name “Grass-of-Parnassus” often occasions wonder; for the
plant, a member of the St. John’s Wort tribe, shows no affinity to
grass. Anne Pratt, in her celebrated book on English Wild-flowers,
says the name possibly arises from the fact that the plant “is as
common as the very grass itself on Mount Parnassus.”

       *       *       *       *       *

_Messieurs les étrangers_ (how good a name!) are now arriving by the
hundred. Flora’s Feast in this region may be said to be over, and the
table is all but cleared. For full two months have we been revelling
in a luxury of colour which no other two months make any but an
indifferent attempt to approach; and it is when these two months have
run their unique, delightful course that the vast majority of our
fellows arrive. How strangely perverse a state of things is this! How
curiously sunken in the groove of custom!

[Illustration: _PARADISIA LILIASTRUM_, the Paradise or St. Bruno’s
Lily. ]

The fields are bald, the <DW72>s are shorn or ragged, and the grass
that is left standing is looking for the most part very “seedy.”
The golden-flowered, pink-flowered, and white-flowered Sedums are
blossoming upon the field-rocks; the Willow-Herb is lighting up the
rough and stony places with its rosy-red spikes; the Bilberry’s fruit
is turning a dusty blue and its foliage here and there is showing
promise of a fiery autumn; the Rhododendron is developing on its thick
leaves the brilliant red excrescences which, like the hairy, red
excrescences on our common Dog Rose, are said to be so efficacious in
cases of rheumatism; the dainty, black-bordered Damon “Blue” butterfly
flits from the Heather to stray blooms of Arnica and Astrantia, and
many a brown Erebia is hampered and tired out by a horde of red
parasites beneath its wings. Summer, in fact, is leaning obviously
towards autumn, and we can expect nothing more of note from these
meadows, except a lovely wealth of magenta-pink Colchicum or “Autumn
Crocus” in August and September.

When visitors, arriving at this late stage in Flora’s fortunes, see my
 transcripts of the fields in May and June, they think that
I, like any prejudiced enthusiast, have falsified my evidence. They
find the pictures _ben trovato_, and they say: “How beautiful! but of
course you have used an artist’s licence?” They look at the shaven or
dingy fields, then again at my paintings, and they tell me plainly
they think they can prove an _alibi_ for the flowers in spring, or,
at any rate, for a greater part of those I have depicted. And I—I can
only assure them their case has “no leg to stand upon.” I can only
insist that if they knew of my despair when seated with my picture
among the flowers in spring—my despair of ever being able to give more
than an inkling of the glorious riot that surrounded me—they would
suspect the truth; and that if next year they came here and witnessed
for themselves, then, when again they looked upon my pictures, they
would curl the lip and speak of insufficiency.

I am aware that it is, of course, not possible for many of the
late-coming visitors to leave the home shores earlier in the year:
business is business, schooling is schooling, fixed holidays are
fixed holidays. But without doubt there are many who could be more
timely, if they chose—many who in June are crowding at Montreux, or
Geneva, or Lucerne, thinking it too early for the mountains. For there
are many who are persuaded that spring is a dangerous period in the
Alps. They will tell you in all seriousness, as they have told me,
that it is in spring in the Alps that the microbes re-awaken after
their winter’s sleep, and that, therefore, it is better to be in the
towns; in the towns, mark you, where the microbes, more monstrous and
numerous, rarely if ever, slumber—or, if they do so, it is with one
eye open!

Then there are those who, because they know nothing about flowers,
are convinced that the Alps for them would be a place of _ennui_ in
the spring when high excursions are not yet possible. But what a
mistake it is to imagine we must be botanists or gardeners in order to
feel a full joy in these fields! No particular knowledge is required
to appreciate them; there is no peremptory need to know by name a
Geranium from an Orchid, a <DW29> from a Cauliflower. Indeed, I am not
at all sure but that the “plain man” or woman does not really enjoy
them more than does the plant specialist. For joy comes mostly fuller
with the broader moments of life, and analysis is apt to injure the
soul-stirring harmony of things. And as the merely emotional value
of these fields is immense, their appeal is quite as general as it
is particular, perhaps even more so; for the emotional qualities of
anything are more acceptable to the man-in-the-street than are its
precise and reasoned quantities. And, just as there are far fewer
musicians within the ranks of executants than outside, so there are
more flower-lovers and lovers of floral beauty outside the ranks of
botany and gardening than there are within. Thus amid these fields
the plain, expansive man or woman need be in no fear of _ennui_.
_Ennui!_—why, even when the visitors do come and the flowers have seen
their best, there is no _ennui_! Then how much more inspiring must it
be when the fields are in their hey-day, not their hay-day!

It is, then, upon all and sundry that I urge the claims of the Alps
from the middle of May to mid-July; it is to the merest tyro in
plant-lore, as well as to the botanical and gardening enthusiast, that
I say, and say in all persuasiveness of conviction: “You know not what
you miss by failing

    ‘To catch the master-note of Nature’s lyre’;

you know not what you lose by neglecting the call of the flowers from
off these Alpine fields.”

Go where you will—Champex alone is not the Alpine throne of Flora;
she reigns superbly to right and left, from Neuchatel to Valais, from
Tessin to Geneva—go where you will amid the Alps and you will find
fields that shall enchant you, rejuvenating your spirit and causing
the “knapsack of custom,” full of “city estimates of great and small,
wise and foolish,” to slip from your back. The plains of the world are
the better for the mountains of the world, and in no respect more so
than when the mountains are a-flower.




CHAPTER X

THE AUTUMN CROCUS

    “Tu viens, Automne,
    Tu viens ensevelir dans tes habits de fête
    Les cadavres couchés au champ de leur défaite.”

                                        ALOYS BLONDEL (the Swiss Poet).


Perhaps the only flower to bless, and bless again, the passage of
the scythe over the damp <DW72>s and fields of Alpine Switzerland
is _Colchicum autumnale_, the so-called Autumn Crocus; for, from
the close-cropped grass it pushes up its blossoms when all other
field-growth has done its utmost. What sorry plight it would be in
if the tall yellowing plants and grasses were still left standing,
cumbering the ground with a dense and matted vegetation! It would be
smothered; or, at best, it would have a fearsome struggle to see the
sky. One wonders how it contrived when, in ages past, these meadows
went uncut. One wonders if the active appetites of browsing animals
sufficed to clear the ground in anticipation of its scheduled advent;
and, should this not have been the case, one wonders if at that time
it were an inhabitant of such fields as these, or whether it were
denizened in more propitious places?

For as soon as the haymakers have gone their way, this lovely flower
begins its apparition. Often, even within a week of the haymakers’
visit, hundreds upon hundreds of its creamy-white pointed buds will
show as if by magic above the close turf; and after a day or two more
of sunshine, the fields will have regained what is almost springtime
life and gaiety. Many of us were sighing whilst we watched the
scythe’s disastrous progress, and were saying that all was over and
it was time to be moving plainwards; but those of us who knew, said:
“Wait—wait! These fields have yet another trump-card to play!”

    “What awe and worship follow in her wake,
    When Nature works wild magic all her own!”

A week ago we looked for colour to the autumn-infected bush and tree,
and now quite suddenly, over the tired fields, there steals a pale
magenta glow, almost as the spring-glow spread by the Bird’s-Eye or
Mealy Primrose; a week ago we lived and dreamed upon the past, and
now we are startled back to the present by this, “the last that the
damp earth yields”—last but not least—last but in some ways equal to
the first.

       *       *       *       *       *

This Colchicum receives, in spring, in summer, and in autumn, as much
general attention as any plant in Alpine or sub-Alpine vegetation.
In spring and summer the cluster of rich-green Lily-like leaves
attracts the eye and raises the curiosity and expectation of even the
casual observer, especially when this observer notices what he almost
invariably takes to be a flower-bud nestling in the heart of the
leaves; for if there is one family of plants which the world worships
more than another, it is the Lily family. And this Autumn Crocus is
very commonly taken for a Lily—a Lily soon to burst into rare and
glorious bloom.

[Illustration: _ROSA ALPINA_, the thornless Alpine Eglantine.]

But it is not the flower-bud our casual observer sees; it is the
seed-head. The plant blooms, leafless, in the autumn; its seed-vessel
is tucked away for the winter a foot or more beneath the surface
of the ground, to rise with the leaves in the spring, and to ripen
with the leaves in the summer. Yet, if our casual friend is wrong as
regards the nature of the seed-head in the spring, he is right
as regards the nature of the leaves; though he is again wrong in the
autumn, and this time as regards the nature of the flower. For the
Colchicum is not a Crocus. Although its magenta-pink blossom is of
Crocus-like form, it has six stamens and three styles with which the
humble-bee may busy himself; whereas the Crocus has but three stamens
and one style. There does exist a purple autumnal Crocus—_Crocus
nudiflorus_, indigenous to England, and with the same habit of
flowering and producing its seed as the Colchicum’s—but this and the
Colchicum belong to different natural orders.

The Colchicum is a member of the Lily family, and, as such, is related
to some of the most distinguished members of the flower-world. For
this reason, too, it is allied to such diverse plants as the Herb
Paris, the Lily-of-the-Valley, the Asparagus, and the Spiked Star of
Bethlehem (_Ornithogalum pyrenaicum_), an indigenous English plant
whose young spring shoots are sold and eaten in Bath as “French”
Asparagus. It has also as blood-relation the Onion and the Garlic,
which, according to Professor G. S. Boulger, “were given divine
honours by the ancient Egyptians”; also the curious Butcher’s Broom
or Knee Holly, and the real Star of Bethlehem (_Ornithogalum
umbellatum_), whose bulbs in Palestine are cooked and eaten.

But if the bulbs and young shoots of some members of this singularly
“mixed” family are esteemed as table delicacies, not so the bulbs and
shoots of the Colchicum, for these are poisonous to a high degree—in
fact, the whole of the plant may be labelled “Dangerous.” Although
the flower is less poisonous than the seed and the bulb, yet many a
time I have seen bees which had sought refuge from the night or from
rough and stormy weather, lying prone and stark within the lovely
pink chalices, victims of a misplaced confidence. The seed contains
a deadly alkaloid (colchicin), used especially in cases of gout.
Where the plant grows in quantities it depreciates the value of the
meadows; for the cattle, wiser in their generation than the bees, give
it a wide berth at all seasons. And it is no easy subject to drive
from the fields when once it has gained firm footing. It buries its
dark chestnut-, scaly bulb at least a foot down in the peaty
soil, necessitating the cutting of a good-sized hole before it can be
extirpated. Hence, if it is growing as it almost invariably does, in
fairly close-packed abundance, the meadow will have to be deep-dug
all over; and such radical measure as this the peasants as a rule
refuse to take, contenting themselves with pulling up the leaf and
stalk before the fields are cut, or with sorting them out from the
new-mown hay.

As a plant indigenous to the British Isles it is very local, though
widely distributed. Saffron Walden, in Essex, is named after it, and
it is found in Ireland and in some parts of Scotland, especially upon
the damp meadows of limestone districts.

The name Colchicum, of Greek origin, is said to be derived from
Colchis, a province in Asia famous for poisonous herbs. In England,
besides the names of Autumn Crocus and Meadow Saffron (_Crocus
sativus_ is really the true Saffron Crocus), its flower is known in
some parts of the country as Naked Boy, and in Dorset as Naked Lucy,
an allusion, of course, to it being bare of leaves. In France its
popular names are seemingly more various, and besides the general one
of _Colchique_, it has those of _Veilleuse_, _Veillotte_, _Violon_,
_Vache_, and _Tue-chien_; while in the patois of Marseilles it is
known as _Bramo-Vaco_, and in that of Gascony as _Safra dès prats_.
In Germany its best-known appellation is _Herbst-Zeitlose_.

There is an Alpine form of the Meadow Saffron—_Colchicum alpinum_—and
this is to be found upon the fields from an altitude of about 3,000
feet to some 4,500 feet, according to M. Henry Correvon, and from
about 1,800 feet to some 6,000 feet, according to Professor Flahault.
Mr. Newell Arber calls it a rare plant “sometimes found in Canton
Tessin and the Valais,” but my own experience is that it is local
rather than rare, and that it is fairly frequent in Canton Valais,
especially in non-limestone regions. Its habit is the same as that of
_autumnale_: two to three upright leaves surrounding the fruit in the
spring, and the flowers appearing “naked” in autumn upon “dim fields
fresh with blooming dew.” But the leaves are narrower than those of
_autumnale_, and the flower is smaller, daintier, more _petite_, with
a suspicion of canary-yellow tinting the stem, which, in _autumnale_,
is white or creamy-white.

I have sometimes noted the two—_autumnale_ and _alpinum_—hob-nobbing
upon the same <DW72> or field. Such fraternity exists, for instance,
quite near to the snug little village of Trient, beneath the Col de
la Forclaz and the Col de Balme, and again on a rich grassy <DW72> by
the lake of Champex; and where this occurs the difference between the
two flowers is manifest. _Colchicum alpinum_ may be only the Alpine
form of _autumnale_, but if it is, it is, I believe, a fixed form—a
form which, unlike some Alpine forms of lowland flowers (such as, for
example, _Anthyllis vulneraria_), steadfastly maintains its highland
character when transported to the gardens of the plain. For if
instability exists, why should we find upon the fields where both do
congregate, no intermediate forms marking the passage of _autumnale_
to _alpinum_ and vice versa? I believe it to be as constant as is
_Gentiana brachyphylla_, although this is said to be but a high Alpine
form of _G. verna_. I believe it to be as “constant as the northern
star.”

       *       *       *       *       *

In a poem to “Noon,” Michael Field sings:

                  “... Sharply on my mind
    Presses the sorrow; fern and flower are blind”;

and this is no uncommon thought, no uncommon “sorrow” for others than
poets to have. Pity for the dear, blind flowers; pity, therefore, for
such a flower as the Autumn Crocus; is it justified? I imagine it is
not. I venture even to say I am sure it is not.

Here is a flower that is exceptional. It defies the general rule, the
usual sequence of life for flowers. It reverses the customary order
of events and, so to speak, turns day into night. And it does so with
the utmost felicity. Its well-being is ideal, for it shows perfect
adaptation to its circumstance. What, then, have we? “What rumour of
what mystery?” Can it be a rumour of disability through blindness? Is
it a rumour of the mystery of justice? Is it, that is to say, a rumour
of “injustice”? I think not; nay, I am sure not. It is, if you ask me,
a rumour of that wide and many-sided efficiency to which we refer when
we declare: “There are more ways than one of killing a cat.”

The fault is quite a common one with us. We fall into it each time we
talk of animals—the “poor, dumb animals.” Wherefore poor? Wherefore
dumb? Man, noisily verbose, condescends to commiserate with anything
less noisy or less verbose than himself. To him, an absence of
capacity for a volubility matching his own marks unhappiness. What, he
asks, would not a cow give for humanity’s gift of the gab? Anything
short of a garrulous chatterbox of a mouse must be a wretched mouse!

How contorted a view to take when every living thing (except, perhaps,
man) is capable of adequate communion with its kind, and when that
which is adequate is happy! The method of communication may not be
man’s method; he may not understand a sound of it, and there may even
be no sound for him to hear; nevertheless there is language clear and
effective—perhaps more clear and more effective than his own. Who
shall say the language of the ant or the bee is not more developed and
more efficient than either English or Chinese? Efficiency does not
ultimately lie in complexity, neither does it ultimately depend upon
noise.

I have no doubt that a horse, unless he has better sense, feels the
profoundest pity for his garrulous master, and counts him among the
most unhappy of his acquaintances. A lion’s roar or a bat’s squeak may
contain a wealth of information such as it would take Man an hour’s
hard talking to translate; and both may indicate a world of happiness.

Man, the rowdiest animal in Creation, is also the most conceited.
He is for ever thanking his stars he is not as others are; and this
enables him to misplace a vast amount of pity. I warrant the poor,
dumb, grunting pig is perfectly happy—far happier than the most glib
of human orators; and far more to the point. Poor, dumb animals? Why,
what a poor, talkative creature is man! And how unmindful of his own
proverb about “little pitchers”!

Eyes are not everything, ears are not everything, tongues are not
everything. Neither are eyes, ears, and tongues together everything.
There is sight without eyes, hearing without ears, and speech without
tongues. Science can prove it, when Science chooses. For there is
sense behind our senses—sense as unerring as any declared by our
senses. I have, indeed, a shrewd suspicion that we may be poor beside
the ant; and I have a somewhat uncomfortable feeling that in some ways
we may be paupers beside poor, blind _Colchicum autumnale_.


[Illustration: Young plants of _VERATRUM ALBUM_, together with _SALVIA
PRATENSIS_, _PHYTEUMA BETONICÆFOLIUM_, _P. ORBICULARE_, the white and
the yellow Euphrasia, and the yellow Clover, drawn on the spot at the
beginning of July. ]

       *       *       *       *       *

Have you ever stayed for autumn in the Alps? Have you seen the
Bilberry glowing among the stolid Rhododendron; the Eglantine
and Berberis bowing beneath the weight of their fiery fruit; the
long-tailed and the crested titmouse hunting in tuneful bands
from sombre Pine to yellowing Larch; the massed companies of piping
choughs surveying for food-stuff upon the open <DW72>s; and the dark
grey or russet viper basking boldly on the sun-baked path? Have
you known the mists and mystery that soften the great and gorgeous
carnival with which Nature celebrates the closing of the round of
her live seasons? If you have, then you will, I know, bear witness
with me to the fullness of this season’s allure; you will agree that
everything around you is in rich accord to sing a glad, gay pæan ere
taking a meed of well-earned repose; and you will admit that, as an
item in this splendid spectacle, nothing is more important, more
appropriate, than _Colchicum autumnale_ and _alpinum_.

Among the most delightful of life’s moments are many of life’s
surprises, and in the floral world few surprises can supply more
delightful moments than the unexpected advent of this “Crocus”

    “... fashioned in the secret mint of things
    And bidden to be here.”

Spring tries hard to repeat herself in the two Meadow Saffrons. One day

    “The meadows are waving high
    With plumy grasses of grey”;

the next, the scythe comes, and, like Harlequin’s wand, passes
restless athwart the ripe scene—and, hey, presto! the fields have
all the closeness of the fields in springtime, and are studded with
countless rosy stars of the Autumn Crocus, just as, in the first
days of the year, they are studded with the myriad rosy stars of
_Bulbocodium vernum_, near relative of our tardy _Colchique_. It is
September struggling to be May or, even, April. It is the goddess of
the flower-fields bidding us to a rosy hope in her recurrent reign.

And yet, and yet—autumn is noticeably in the blood of things. This
is not quite the rosiness of the year’s youth. There is something of
mauve in it; something of a becoming consideration for old age. It
is obviously an autumnal pink—a pink which falls without ado into
the glorious colour-scheme of Nature’s kindling funeral-pyre. It has
something of the spirit of the colouring surrounding a Chinese burial.
There is sadness, if you will; but there is gladness, whether you will
or not. Chopin’s famous Funeral March might have been inspired by
autumn’s pale-magenta “Crocus.”




PART II

_A PLEA_

    “Viens au jardin! Viens au jardin! Je veux te dire
    Ce que je pense, car ma pensée est à toi
    Comme la brume au sol et la fumée au toit.
    Viens au jardin!”

                                        ROSEMONDE GÉRARD, _Les Jardins_.




CHAPTER XI

ALPINE FIELDS FOR ENGLAND

     “En multipliant la beauté, en donnant au monde des humbles le
     sens de la sincère beauté, vous lui aurez fait la plus exquise et
     peut-être la plus utile des charités.”—PIERRE VIGNOT.


The title of this chapter will come as a shock to some, and they will
think it an insult to, and an outrage upon, Nature’s existing efforts
for English meadows. In my previous volume, “Alpine Flowers and
Gardens,” I ventured some mild wonder “that more attempts are not made
in England to create Alpine pastures,” and I added: “Alpine rockworks
we have in hundreds, but a stretch of meadow-land sown or planted
with Alpine field-flowers seems as yet to be but rarely attempted.”
And of this mild wonder some of my critics fell foul, and I was told
that I seemed “to forget the peculiar beauty of English pasture as
it is, with its buttercups, cowslips, and orchis, daisies and red
sorrel.” But let me reassure these nervous champions of what is “made
in England.” I will be the last to slight or traduce the exquisite
restraint of our typical home-fields, or to despise the spirit that
can appreciate their charm and place it higher than the charm of
alien fields. The inhabitants of a country are intimately affected by
the country’s fields, and an Englishman is far more a product of his
meadows than even he would suppose. His sturdy advocacy of a floral
sufficiency which stops at Dandelions and Buttercups is part proof of
this. Reciprocity in Nature is a very subtle and far-reaching law, and
man owes much of his temperament and habit of mind to the landscape
and its constituent parts. In this way, undoubtedly, the Englishman is
largely indebted to the comparative taciturnity of his fields. Far be
from me, then, to under-rate their value and their charm.

And yet, may I not think that this value and charm can perhaps be
augmented? We love and revel in our native meadows as they are—their
Buttercups, their Dandelions, their Daisies, and their Grasses; how
much greater would not the love and revel be if here and there a
generous measure of Swiss mountain-wealth were added? Such measure
would be no violent innovation; it would be a natural amplification
of the hereditary trend of our instinct for the beautiful. Swiss
mountain-fields are not like Japanese gardens: our nature responds to
them without affectation, for in them our mind

    “Doth straight its own resemblance find.”

It is all very well for confirmed materialists to say we have not to
study this side of the question because it is too fanciful; it is not
to be dismissed by calling us mystics. Fancy has led men to much that
is now inseparable from their understanding, and the mystic has stood
for ages upon spots where Science is only now confidently placing her
foot. Really and truly, too, the æsthetic aspect of life comes under
the head of the utilitarian, and it matters more than much that is
deemed material. Ruskin thought that “a wood of English trees is of
more value to humanity than a Bank;” but this savours of too dogmatic
thinking, and of the extreme dream of a specialist enthusiast. Without
drawing invidious comparisons between the utilities of life, we may
say that the woods and fields have an importance all their own, and
that, by increasing their beauty, we increase their importance.

I do not for one instant think that in Maytime we could improve
upon the weighty wealth of Hawthorn set amid knee-deep meadows
of Buttercups and Parsnips; for the rare witchery of it all is
unmistakable. I would leave it as it stands: British _par excellence_,
unrivalled for quiet prosperity, for unique felicity. Nor would I
tamper with the wealth of Primrose copse, or attempt to meddle with
the woods of Bluebells, Daffodils, and Foxgloves. To do any such thing
would be purest sacrilege—and a wild conceit into the bargain! No, no;
there is much, very much in Britain’s countryside that rightly stands
in the front rank of Nature’s happiest creations, and it were mad
impertinence to think to oust it or to improve it by inept additions.
But these front-rank marvels are not everywhere. Many is the spot that
might reasonably be bettered; many the wayside field, copse, bank, or
railway-cutting that would repay us for a little help; and it is in
such places (_pax_, O Farmer! have I not gone round to avoid treading
on your property?)—it is with regard to such places that I do suggest
we might take a leaf from Nature’s Alpine book.

[Illustration: ARNICA, the Brown Gentian (_G. purpurea_), _CAMPANULA
BARBATA_, and the fiery little _HIERACIUM AURANTIACUM_, painted from
life in the fields towards the middle of July. ]

But why, some will ask—why interfere with our indigenous
field-flowers, and thus with our pure-bred English fields; why
cause anything so individual to become mongrel? And this sounds
plausible until we examine the pedigree of some of our “indigenous”
flowers, and find that they are “doubtful natives,” and owe their
presence among us to the Roman invader or are “escapes from
cultivation.” Precedent is therefore on our side. Then why should not
we of this twentieth century do as did the Romans for Britain—only
with a little more method, not trusting to the seed of Alpine
field-flowers coming inadvertently to England in our portmanteaux, our
boots, or our hair? We ought not to be afraid of the inevitable trend
of things towards a more general, more common aspect. We may well
nurse some particular individuality so long as it is eminently useful,
but at the same time we should leave our judgment open with regard
to accretion, or, as the dictionary calls it, “increase by natural
growth.” Insularity is a disappearing quantity, and there surely will
and must come a time when we shall chiefly hear of it from books of
ancient history and scandalous _Mémoires_.

But if for the present we cannot bring ourselves to continue
systematically the work of the Romans, let us at least take in hand
some of the field-plants we have already with us, and induce them to
become more general and abundant. Even in that way we should approach
to something of Alpine prodigality; for there is quite a goodly number
of British plants among the colour-giving subjects of an Alpine
meadow. There is, for instance, _Geranium sylvaticum_ (the rose or
blue-mauve Wood Crane’s-bill), rare, and found mostly upon pastures in
the north; or there is _Astrantia major_ (the pinky-green-and-white
Masterwort), an “escape,” near Ludlow and Malvern; or _Phyteuma
spicata_ (the cream- Rampion), found only in Sussex; or
_Salvia pratensis_ (the rich-blue Meadow Clary), scarce, and confined
to fields in Kent, Oxfordshire, and Cornwall; or _Polemonium cœruleum_
(the blue Jacob’s Ladder or Greek Valerian), rare, and confined to
the north of England. Why should not such as these be brought from
out their hiding and be induced to people propitious places in a more
abundant way?

No sooner, however, does “sweet reasonableness” begin to dawn upon
our imaginations, and we commence to take kindly to our idea, than
we are confronted by the irate farmer—hasty and nervous lest we and
our “weeds” have designs upon his domain—upbraiding us for daring to
suggest such palpably bad farming. But we have no intent to meddle
with _his_ meadows. Yet if we had, what answer can we make him? Is it
of any use for us to point to Swiss experience of flowery pastures,
telling him that the finest cheeses—those of Gruyère and Emmenthal—are
made on the middle or lower “alpen,” and that, in fact, they come from
fields which are literally crammed with lovely flowering plants? Is it
of any use assuring him that cows fed on the comparatively flowerless
fields of Fully, for example, opposite Martigny in the Rhône Valley,
give not only less, but less rich milk than those fed on the fields
of Chemin, Chables, or Champex, and that, whenever possible, the
flowerless hay goes to the horses? Is it of any use pointing out
these facts to our scandalised friend? Possibly not. Possibly he
will retort: “Necessity makes high use of just whatsoever is within
reach; other lands other ways; circumstance creates ideals.” And quite
possibly he will be right.

       *       *       *       *       *

But whatever may be said in disparagement of the introduction
of Alpine plants into England’s fields in general, little or no
objection can be made to fields of such plants as adjuncts to Alpine
rock-gardens, or as embellishments to park and pleasaunce. Here we
are in a domain which is “orthodoxly” regarded as æsthetic, and not
as practical or utilitarian. And, after all, we had best begin by the
thin end of the wedge—we had best commence with these flower-fields as
a “luxury”; afterwards—as is quite likely—we may be able to chronicle
“escapes” into the general scheme of the countryside.

I can think of no feature of the Alpine landscape which could add
so much charm and interest to English Alpine gardens as an Alpine
meadow, and it is no mean matter for surprise that this feature has
not so far claimed the attention it most assuredly merits. Moreover,
an Alpine rock-garden shorn of its meadow-setting is less than a
picture devoid of its frame. Can any one who knows the Alps imagine
what they and their rock-flora would be without the fields and grassy
<DW72>s? Would there be the same widespread and immediate interest? It
is inconceivable, for these fields and <DW72>s are, as it were, the
exquisitely sumptuous hall through which, amazed and wondering, we
pass to gain the rudeness and refinement of Alpine asceticism proper.

Then there is another and, I think, a crying reason for the creation
of fields to supplement our rockworks; we garden at present, for
the most part, as if all Alpines were rock-plants, whereas quite an
important percentage are purely field-flowers. It will be said that in
England’s comparatively luxurious climate the grasses would overwhelm
the Alpines and that, therefore, it is only wise to place these latter
out of harm’s way. But, although there certainly are some subjects
of an Alpine meadow which could scarcely be expected to grapple
successfully with English conditions, yet there is a whole host that
could do so, especially if care were taken to choose suitable grasses
and to exclude certain English weeds (the Field Bindweed, for example,
or the Plantain). In advocating any such adoption as the present, we
must not be so unphilosophic as to be sweeping and dogmatic; we must
be quick to recognise that such subjects of the Alpine grass-lands as
_Viola calcarata_ and _Gentiana verna_, _excisa_, and _nivalis_ shall
of necessity be ushered to the rockwork when they arrive in our island
home. But, frankly, I believe there are many of these plants which
would be altogether grateful to find themselves in a field rather than
in a garden-border or upon a rockery.

Will any one deny that a plant which, in a wild, free state,
invariably chooses to dwell upon the meadows is not more at home
there than when robbed of such pressing, self-sought company? Will
any one deny that, for instance, _Campanula rhomboidalis_, _Paradisia
Liliastrum_, _Salvia pratensis_, _Narcissus poeticus_, _Veratrum
album_, or _Phyteuma betonicifolium_ are not infinitely happier when
growing together in close company with grasses than when standing in
select isolation upon the rockery or the garden-border?

Possibly it will be argued that these field-plants show themselves
so much better on the border or the rockwork. But do they? Does
Colchicum, for example, look better against the brown earth of a
border than upon a thick-set carpet of green? Does _Veronica spicata_
ever look better than when seen upon the fields of the Alps? Is it
possible that the Meadow-Orchids are not at their best among the
grasses? For my own part, I find many of these plants look thin and
lonesome when carefully set apart “to do themselves full justice.” In
nature they are items in a rich reciprocal scheme of intimacy, and in
this assuredly is their truest happiness; therefore, as part of this
scheme they must certainly be seen at their best. Snatched from their
social birthright and perched in grandeur upon a rockwork, they cannot
but have wistful thoughts of lost companionship.

Owners of rockworks may protest that they do all they possibly can for
their captives, treating them as tenderly as they would any beautiful
bird in a cage; they may protest that their captives are fed and
watered most carefully and know little or nothing of the struggle for
existence which rules upon Alpine meadows. And this is all very right
and proper as far as it goes; but very many of these plants could be
treated even more kindly and properly by allowing them something of
their ancestral habits. That which untrammelled Nature decrees for her
offspring is inevitably best, and we should take practical note of it
where possible. We ourselves are rebels and, as modern instance shows,
are very conscious of it in our more rational moments, crying aloud
in a hazy, frightened way, that we must “get back to Nature!” Why,
then, compel rebellion in so many a thing we admire? Such compulsory
estrangement from what is natural is a sorry sort of kindness. Let us
put back the field-flowers into the fields—or, at any rate, as many as
we may.

To a great number of flower-lovers this would be a much simpler
matter than the building and tending of rockworks (though, of
course, the ideal should be for the field to companion or environ
the rockery). It would be less complicated, and it would not entail
such a variety of specialist knowledge. Many of a kind, and each kind
robust and, for the most part, ordinary—that should be the rule among
the plants for our Alpine meadow. Fractious, exigent rarities would
naturally not be welcome. Fields are perhaps loveliest when planned
upon broad lines. There is no need to make extraordinary efforts
to find sports and forms; no need to do more than Nature does—here
and there a white or porcelain-grey _Campanula rhomboidalis_, here
and there a pale-pink _Geranium sylvaticum_, here and there a white
_Salvia pratensis_, here and there a white _Colchicum autumnale_.
Forms and sports and vagaries are all very well, but in these meadows
it is the type-plant which counts. A field of Salvia, Campanula, and
Geranium is blue and mauve; that is the general effect, and variation
from it rarely counts in the colour-scheme. Eccentricity we may keep
for the proud eminence of our rockworks.


[Illustration: The tall yellow _HYPOCHŒRIS UNIFLORA_, _CENTAUREA
UNIFLORA_, the Golden Hawkweed (_Crepis aurea_) drawn from life in the
July fields. ]

       *       *       *       *       *

If it is not possible to transplant to the plains the clean,
invigorating air which goes so far to form the joy exhaled of Alpine
meadows; if we may not lay on the wonderful atmosphere of the Alps as
we may the ozone from the seaside,—we can at least take the flowers,
those brilliant children of the Alpine ether, and thus help materially
towards mountain purity in our parks and gardens. Some of the gaiety
might be lost in the process—some of that intensity of colouring
which steals over the very grass as it climbs the mountain-side and
encroaches upon the kingdom of the Rhododendron. _Astrantia major_
might lose its rosy-magenta blush and assume a more or less livid
green-white; Lychnis, Geranium, and Salvia might lack something of
their Alpine lustre; a certain mildness might reign generally in
the place of mountain briskness; but, on the whole, the loss to the
flowers would be small and the gain to the garden or the landscape
immense, and we should find that we had annexed much of the charm and
joy of Alpine days—

    “Days lit with the flame of the lamps of the flowers.”




CHAPTER XII

SOME WAYS AND MEANS

     “No gardener has made experiments, however small, in the formation
     of a rock garden and the culture of Alpine plants without bringing
     a new gladness to himself and others.”—S. REYNOLDS HOLE, _A Book
     About the Garden_.


For such as wish to set about creating an Alpine meadow, either as
an attractive feature of their pleasure-grounds or—which is more to
the point—as a completing part of their rock-garden, let me at once
say that this volume is no detailed _vade mecum_, and that, for the
cultural requirements of the plants mentioned, recourse must be had to
the many good books already dealing with that phase of the subject.
All that is pretended here is to point the way to a much-neglected
path in Alpine circumstance and to attempt to arouse the necessary
enthusiasm for its better and more just appreciation, incidentally
indicating what may be novel in its aspect and untouched by
Alpine gardening books. To this end, then, I would try to conjure up a
representative field or meadow of the Alps. But, before doing so, let
me impress upon the reader that, not only will it be no Alpine field
in the popular sense, but that we may occasionally have to descend
even to the fields of the Swiss plain in order to find one or two
subjects which we can use with advantage to enrich our scheme—plants
such as the Star of Bethlehem and _Scilla bifolia_. The Swiss plains
lie high when judged by English standards; rarely, if ever, do they
fall below some 1,200 feet.

       *       *       *       *       *

The field I have in my mind’s eye as I write these lines is one which,
“with its early and exquisite diversities of form and colour”—to quote
again from Dean Hole’s little book—“is a new and large delight.”
It is one in which the bulbs, hundreds upon hundreds in number and
about five in kind, burst into life with the grass in the first
days of spring. White and purple _Crocus vernus_, rosy Crocus-like
_Bulbocodium vernum_, and yellow Gagea are the first-comers, quickly
followed by the golden Daffodil (_Narcissus Pseudo-narcissus_), the
bright blue _Scilla bifolia_, the green-and-white Star of Bethlehem
(_Ornithogalum umbellatum_) and its handsome large-flowered relative,
_O. nutans_. Then, following close upon the Violet, Cowslip, and
Oxlip, come the earlier of the Orchids—_Orchis Morio_, _O. mascula_,
and _O. maculata_. A little later _Myosotis sylvestris_ spreads a blue
haze over the field, aiding most admirably the lively pink of _Orchis
(Gymnadenia) conopsea_, and rendering the appearance of _Paradisia
Liliastrum_, the paper-white Paradise Lily, daintier than ever. And
now I see a glorious multitude of Pheasant-eye Narcissus (_Narcissus
poeticus_), with here and there a tall, deep blue or purple Columbine.
Lemon-yellow _Biscutella lævigata_, too, clear-blue _Linum alpinum_,
and white _Potentilla rupestris_ blend their blossoms to produce a
lovely harmony in true spring-like key. _Muscari comosum_ throws
up its curious blue-purple spikes, over-topped by the white sprays
of _Anthericum Liliago_. And in the moister part of the meadow I
see great colonies of _Ranunculus aconitifolius_ and the yellow
Globe-Flower (_Trollius europæus_) sown in most happy manner with
our Ragged-Robin (_Lychnis Flos-cuculi_), presently to be joined by
bright-pink regiments of Bistort or Snakeweed (_Polygonum Bistorta_).
And then, when _Centaurea montana_, accompanied by _Geranium
sylvaticum_, _Salvia pratensis_, _Lychnis dioica_ (the Red Catchfly),
_Silene Cucubalus_ (the Bladder Campion), and _Polemonium cæruleum_
usher in the summer, the field is rich indeed in blue, mauve, lilac,
red, and pink, with a distinct leaning towards blue, mauve, and lilac.
And these colours seem to hold their own to the end. White may come
with the Ox-eye Daisy (_Chrysanthemum leucanthemum_) and the many
Umbelliferæ; red may come with brilliant _Centaurea uniflora_ and
crimson _C. nigra_, the common Hard-head; yellow may come with tall
_Hypochœris uniflora_ and such Buttercups as _Ranunculus bulbosus_ and
_R. acris_, but blue and mauve and lilac seem always to predominate;
for the Rampions (_Phyteuma betonicæfolium_ and _P. orbiculare_) and
Campanulas (_C. rotundifolia_ and _C. rhomboidalis_) join forces with
the Meadow Clary and the Wood Crane’s-bill and linger on until the
Martagon Lily is gone out of flower and the field stands more than
ready for the scythe. Indeed, long after the scythe has done its
worst, and _Colchicum autumnale_ is a thing of yesterday, and autumn’s
fires have paled, and

    “The few late flowers have moisture in the eye,”

those flowers, or the major portion of those flowers, will be blue and
mauve and lilac—Campanula, Geranium, and Salvia.

A field such as this is a garden in itself, and a revelation,
surely, for those who know only our home-fields. And it will be
noted that in such a field there need be no destruction of effective
English field-flowers. Indeed, the addition of Alpine wealth to
our home-fields ought not to oust any but rank invaders, such as
the Plantain, the Nettle, or the Bindweed, or other “volunteers,”
as Californians picturesquely call them. Our Buttercups, Daisies,
Orchids, and Red Sorrel should be secure; Dandelions and Ox-eye
Marguerites can, and should, continue their reign as of yore; for all
of these are constituents of meadows in the Alps. Thus, if we create
meadows to companion our rockworks, we should be growing many an
Alpine which at present we do not allow among our Alpines; and in this
way, if in no other, our Alpine gardens would be far more complete,
far more representative, and, therefore, far more worthy the name.

No; because a flower is already common in England is no necessary
reason why it should be taboo in any Alpine field we may create in
England. Indeed, such common things as the Marsh Marigold (_Caltha
palustris_), the two Buttercups (_Ranunculus acris_ and _R. bulbosus_)
and the Bladder Campion (_Silene Cucubalus_) are most precious. Who
that has seen the Marsh Marigold pencilling with golden lines the
course of some mountain rivulet through the spring fields, and lying,
with _Primula farinosa_, a brilliant mass, in some juicy hollow; or
the two Buttercups, blending with acres of _Ranunculus aconitifolius_,
and forming a filmy sea of yellow and white; or <DW72>s packed with the
Bladder Campion and the tall Rampion (_Phyteuma betonicæfolium_), a
perfect picture of grey-white and blue,—who that has seen these common
flowers thus growing but has not vowed rarity to be no essential
passport to the ranks of beauty? I remember once—it was at Montroc,
near the Col des Montets—passing over a meadow-<DW72> of Bladder
Campion and Rampion, with just a sprinkling of that other and closely
allied Campion, _Silene nutans_ (the Nottingham Catchfly), and the
effect so fascinated me, as to send up these Campions considerably in
my esteem, as subjects with decorative possibilities of which I had
not dreamed.

Objection may possibly be taken to the large area required for the
creation of an Alpine meadow in comparison with its short duration
as “a thing of beauty.” It will perhaps be objected that our field
must be mown; that the ripening growth cannot be allowed “to lie in
cold obstruction and to rot”; that, from July to the end of the year,
the field will be a stubbly place of emptiness, whereas our rockwork
will bear a continual round of interest until the coming of the frost.
And this complaint would be reasonable if we were dealing with just
an English meadow set with certain Alpine plants to make it gayer
than is its habit. But we are not—not, that is to say, if we are
contemplating the meadow as a companioning feature of our rock-garden.
A typical Alpine meadow is full of “accident”; there is nothing of the
billiard-table about its eventful surface. Palpably, it must have been
the scene of utmost violence before Nature decked it out with verdure.
Steep depressions; wide gullies; abrupt limits, falling suddenly away
in a grassless, rocky bank to a rough path below,—such “accidents” as
these break its even tenor. Rocks, grey and lichen-flecked, crop up
from it here and there—rocks hurled in some past fury from the heights
above or borne from afar upon the breast of some ancient glacier; for
an Alpine field, more often than not, is a delightful combination of
rockwork and pasture. Hence there is accommodation for a much
wider range of plant-life than in a meadow run upon English lines, and
the season of interest is, therefore, as long-lived as that of any
part of our garden. “Accident,” indeed, is the constant characteristic
of it, and floral variety the natural corollary. When the hay has been
made upon the richer portions of it, the poorer or more broken parts
and the rocks continue to abound in blossom, giving us such things
as the Thalictrums, Monkshoods, Peas, Veronicas, Pinks, Saxifrages,
Sempervivums, and Sedums.

[Illustration: _GENTIANA CAMPESTRIS_ and _GENTIANA BAVARICA_. ]

When, therefore, we choose the parcel of ground to be transformed into
a Swiss mountain meadow, we should not be dismayed if its surface is
already more than undulating; we should not summon assistance to level
it up and smooth it out. We are not proposing to make a croquet-lawn,
but are supposed to be inspired by Nature in one of her wild,
“irresponsible” moods. Violence, however, should depend upon size.
If we are dealing with several acres, we can afford to be grand with
regard to “accident”; but if the land at our disposal is, perhaps,
half an acre, irregularity should be to scale; for to be artistic we
should avoid extravagance.

Rocks, as has been said, are an almost essential feature of an
Alpine field. The ground should rise towards them and should be of
a poorer nature than where the grass is to be really meadowy; for
upon the poorer ground we shall be dependent for many colonies of gay
and interesting plants which would be out of place, even they could
exist, among the thicker grasses. Here we may count upon brilliance
long after the Geranium and its field-consorts have been mown
down—brilliance afforded by such subjects as _Ononis natrix_, _Linum
tenuifolium_, _L. alpinum_, _Jasione montana_, _Campanula spicata_,
_C. barbata_, _C. persicifolia_, _Trifolium alpinum_, _Eryngium
alpinum_, _Vicia onobrychioides_, _Veronica urticæfolia_, _Lathyrus
heterophyllus_, _Anthyllis vulneraria_, _Carduus defloratus_,
_Verbascum phlomoides_, and _Onobrychis viciæfolia_, the rosy Sainfoin
or “wholesome hay,” for which the ass is said to bray.

The rocks employed ought, in greater part, to be of a “generous”
nature, not hard and unresponsive. They should if possible be even
soft (as rocks go) and somewhat liable to disintegration—rocks upon
which, with a little preliminary encouragement, Sedums, Dianthus, and
Sempervivums can take root. They ought not to be built up to form
what is generally recognised as a rockwork, but should be large,
massive, and sparsely set, cropping up from the ground haphazard
and as if their greater bulk were beneath the soil. Grass should be
encouraged to grow about them, even upon them in places; and _Poa
alpina, forma vivipara_ is a suitable, as well as a most interesting,
grass for this purpose. The Alpine Clover, too (_Trefolium alpinum_),
may well be encouraged to spread around the base of these rocks and
over the ground that <DW72>s up to them. With its large, loose, rosy
flower-heads, sometimes white or lilac, it is an ever-welcome June
visitor, especially where it luxuriates; as, for instance, at Le
Planet, below the French side of the Col de Balme.

I have said that the rocks ought, _in greater part_, to be of
a “generous” nature; and I have said this because a hard and
unresponsive rock here and there would not be out of place. Although
quantity equally with quality is the predominant note in Alpine
floral circumstance, it is not an invariable rule, and something of
barrenness only adds to the scene of plenty. Moreover, a cold, bare
rock with just one cleft in it where some single tuft of Dianthus,
or of _Veronica saxatilis_, for instance, can cling is often a very
precious object amid a surrounding exuberance of blossom. Often in
English rock-gardens there is too little unoccupied rock. Ubiquity
of plant life in this respect is not so artistic as when there is a
modicum of reticence; nor is it so truthful.

Another by no means inappropriate feature is that which can be lent by
shrubs or bushes; not as hedges, for Switzerland, when compared with
England, may be said to be devoid of

        “... Little lines
    Of sportive wood run wild.”

characteristic commonplaces in England, where, it is said, they cover
one and a half million acres, they are rare in Switzerland; or, at any
rate, as Leslie Stephen remarked, “those detestable parallelograms,
which cut up English scenery with their hedgerows, are sternly
confined to the valley.” And in the valley they are comparatively
scarce, and lack the charm pertaining to the English hedgerow.

No; if our field is to have an Alpine allure, hedges must be tabu.
But a negligent grouping around the rocks or upon the outskirts
of the field, of such bushes as _Rhododendron ferrugineum_, _Rosa
alpina_, _Berberis vulgaris_, _Rosa pomifera_, _Juniperus nana_,
_Sambucus racemosa_, and the two Honeysuckles, _Lonicera alpigena_
and _L. nigra_, would not only enhance the effect and interest, but
would tally with Nature as she generally rules in the Alps. Nor
would the Bird Cherry (_Prunus avium_), if kept in bush form, be out
of place. This lovely spring-flowering tree, treated as a hedgerow
subject on the plateau at the back of Lausanne, is an arresting
object in the fields around Chamonix at the end of May. And here,
with the shade and shelter of such bushes, may come the nobly plumed
Goat’s Beard (_Spiræa Aruncus_), the mauve and the cream-plumed
_Thalictrum aquilegifolium_, the deep-blue _Aconitum napellus_, the
violet-blue _A. paniculatum_, the creamy-white _A. Lycoctonum_,
the rosy _Adenostyles albifrons_, the ever-graceful Solomon’s Seal
(_Polygonatum verticillatum_), the blue-mauve _Mulgedium alpinum_, the
red-brown _Lilium Martagon_, the brilliant orange _L. croceum_, the
pale-yellow _Salvia glutinosa_, the golden _Lathyrus luteus_, the pink
and feathery _Dianthus superbus_, the Fennel-like _Meum athamanticum_,
the distinctive Umbellifer, _Laserpitium latifolium_, besides such
Orchids as _Epipactis atrorubens_, _E. latifolia_, _Cephalanthera
ensifolia_, _C. pallens_, _C. rubra_, and _Habenaria (Plantanthera)
chlorantha_.

If we are to have some kind of boundary-mark to our field, let it be
by preference a low, mortarless wall of fairly large rough stones or
pieces of rock built up with earth—a sort of rockwork wall. These
walls may be met with almost anywhere in the Swiss mountains, and are
frequently composed of fragments of rock which at one time and another
have been strewn about the fields by rockfalls or avalanches. They
often become the home of brilliant masses of such plants as _Saponaria
ocymoides_, _Silene rupestris_, _Gypsophila repens_, _Helianthemum
vulgare_, _Arabis alpina_, _Calamintha alpina_, and _Cerastium
alpinum_, thus adding considerably to the gaiety and charm of the
fields—a gaiety and charm which in the case of these walls lasts well
into the autumn.

Some difficulty may be experienced over the grass which is to
accompany the meadow-flowers. Indeed, it is an objection usually
raised whenever I have broached the subject of Alpine fields to
gardening enthusiasts; they fear that English meadow-grass would
overwhelm the stranger-flowers by leaving them no room to breathe. But
is not this obstacle one rather of hasty imagining than of reality?
We are not proposing to put _Viola alpina_, _Gentiana verna_, or the
Soldanella into the field. Moreover, there are grasses and grasses;
and I believe a very suitable selection could be made from any of
the leading seed-merchants. I should suggest that the ground be sown
with smaller, daintier grasses, and _only after the flowering-plants
have become more or less established_; and I imagine that if this
were done—and a sharp eye kept for the ever-ready invasion by native
weeds—the imported field-flowers would hold their own.

An interesting fact in connection with Alpine fields—one that
should not be copied in England—is the tendency of what is usually
shade-loving vegetation to creep out into the sunlight. In spite of
the intensity and power of the sun’s rays, even certain ferns, such
as _Aspidium Lonchitis_, the Holly-fern, and _Polystichum Filix-mas_,
seem to think nothing of basking upon the hottest <DW72>s. True, their
roots are generally sheltered by rock and stone, but the fronds look
the sun squarely in the face; and yet, what can possibly be fresher
and more engaging than, for instance, the masses of Parsley-fern to be
met with in the stony places of the granitic Alps? Wood-Sorrel, too,
will come out into the open; so will the little Alpine London Pride
(_Saxifraga cuneifolia_) and the little Yellow Violet; so, also, will
the May Lily or False Lily-of-the-Valley (_Smilacina bifolia_). In
England, _Astrantia major_, when found, is said to seek the partial
shade of copse and spinny, but here on these Alpine fields it is in
the full sunshine—and looking very much the better for such boldness.
It is as though the higher plants climb, the less they fear the light,
extraordinarily searching though this latter be; it is as though they
revel in the purity, and, casting retirement to the winds, take on a
new and healthier joy in life.

[Illustration: _ASTRANTIA MAJOR_, _A. MINOR_, and the Apollo
butterfly. ]

There is, perhaps, just one other matter calling for special
attention: the grouping of colours. Alpine fields own immense variety
in this regard. Some will be almost of uniform tint, while others
are of a bewildering, diverse blend. One will be blue and white
(_Campanula rhomboidalis_ and Ox-eye Daisy); another will be blue
and red (_Salvia pratensis_ and _Lychnis diocia_); another, yellow
and pink (the Globe-Flower and the Bistort); while another will be a
close, irregular mixture of some score or more of colours, with no
one in particular predominating. Although Nature in her wildness is
almost invariably “happy,” it is only natural that some of her results
should be happier than others; and it is well to take note of the
best she can do. Personally, I find her happiest when she keeps her
palette simple, painting broadly, and not indulging in Segantini-like
technique. And surely her simpler floral harmonies are among the
perpetual delights of the Alps, and incapable of being bettered by
even the most fancifully fastidious of “post-impressionists”? What
could be more charming than, for instance, the simple combination of
pale yellow and paper-white, or of rosy-pink and rich mauve when, as
is quite usual, Biscutella and Cerastium, or _Saponaria ocymoides_
and _Calamintha alpina_ are luxuriating around and among the rocks;
or when blue Myosotis and white Paradise Lily, or canary-
Crepis and sky-blue Veronica, or white Potentilla and rosy-mauve
Geranium, or vivid orange Arnica and lilac Orchids are blooming in
important numbers side by side among the grasses? I do not advocate
formality—the formality depicted in Andrew Marvell’s lines:

    “See how the flowers, as at parade,
    Under their colours stand display’d”:

which suggests the careful horrors of bedding-out. A certain
negligence is imperative; we may be studious as regards effect, but
we must not show it. The question of colour-grouping is certainly one
worthy of careful consideration; for if gardening is not exactly an
art that “doth mend Nature,” it is, at all events, a selective art,
picking and choosing of Nature’s best and bringing this together
within special confines, there to show in a series of close-knit
_tableaux_ that which wild Nature spreads out far and wide among much
that, æsthetically, is of secondary “happiness.”




L’ENVOI

    “But none has hope like thine!
      Thou through the fields and through the woods dost stray,
    Roaming the country-side, a truant boy,
    Nursing thy project in unclouded joy,
      And every doubt long blown by time away.”

                                  MATTHEW ARNOLD, _The Scholar-Gipsy_.


Pen- and brush-craft pale their ineffectual fires before the beauty
of Alpine grass-lands, and flawful and halting has been the manner
of presenting my subject; but I hope a sufficient glimpse of its
fascination and importance will have been caught to raise enthusiasm
to the point of making amends for a neglectful past. Whatever may
be the verdict upon the question of introducing Swiss floral wealth
to our meadows generally, perhaps enough has been said to make it
plain that very many of the mountain field-flowers cry aloud to be
treated _as field-flowers_ in every Alpine garden where there is
scope for, and pretensions to, completeness. And I believe that the
cry will be answered. I believe that the value of the fields, in the
economy of Alpine plant-life, has only to be placed earnestly before
conscientious gardeners and lovers of flowers for it to meet with
immediate and becoming diligence. I believe it will be seen that a
rockwork is not the first, last, and only home we may make for Alpines
in England, and that it is as unlovely as it is unjust to tar all of
them with one and the same brush and think that, because they are
called Alpines, they must necessarily be given a perch dominating the
rest of the garden. I therefore believe that one more of our cherished
conventionalities will soon be relegated to the “Valhalla of bad
taste.”

We “are still looking through a kaleidoscope at ever-changing views,”
and “the eternal verities” have as yet by no means been sounded to
their bases. If “Badsworth” can find sufficient sanction to talk
like this of auction bridge, with how much more reason may it not be
said of gardening and the cult of Nature? It is doubtful if we have
reached much that is final in anything; certainly not in gardening.
Gardening—or flower-gardening, since that is the department with
which we are here dealing—flower-gardening is something more than
the mere growing of blossoms to please, something more than the mere
forming of a living herbarium, something more than the mere creation
or collecting of “novelties” for the sole sake of novelty; there is
something deeper and more difficult to talk about than that—something
none the less real because largely indefinable. As earnest, thinking
gardeners, our views and sentiments are not limited to a mere
toying with the soil and with attractive vegetation. We are not
children—though we ought to be, and are. I mean, we do not garden—we
do not build Alpine rockworks and plant them with gay flowers quite so
irresponsibly as children build mud-castles and stick them over with
 oddments. There is a significant profundity in the meanest of
our efforts—even in the building of mud-castles; and in the maturer
effort of gardening it is only natural that this should be of richer
meaning.

Gardening is a saving grace in any nation. It would be invidious to
name examples; enough to say that nations with marked propensities
for gardening figure prominently in past and present history. Such
nations, though “insurgent sons,” are necessarily less so than they
would otherwise be; for they live nearer to the truth of things,
nearer to Nature. Gardening touches well-springs of being, and helps
materially towards the moral advancement of a race. It is affected by
the same fundamental “psychic” influence as is painting, or, indeed,
any other of our kindred enthusiasms. In it we are striving, not
so much to express Nature, as to express ourselves through Nature;
not so much to transcribe Nature line for line, as to translate—as
creatures who consider ourselves so much apart from, so much above,
Nature—what we think we feel, perhaps see, and almost certainly dream
in her. And far be it from me to aver that we are not striving even
to supplant Nature—seemingly a mad ambition, for in the end, do as we
will, Nature, and nothing but Nature, has found expression. Yet it
is not quite as mad an ambition as a first inspection would lead us
to suppose. Indeed, it is good, if not actually great; for it is the
biggest of the many bunches of carrots dangling in front of the human
animal’s nose, inducing him to keep “pegging away.”

[Illustration: The WILLOW GENTIAN (_G. asclepiadea_) and the Alpine
Cotton Grass (_Eriophorum Scheuchzeri_). ]

Independent and original as we may consider ourselves, we yet from
time to time have to turn and take our cue from Nature. She, after
all, is the source at which we must refresh our jaded imaginations;
she is the storehouse from which we must draw new blood, new
energy, new ideas; she instigates our ideals and holds the cause and
means for inspiration; without her promptings, in fact, we should
go bankrupt. In the Buddhist “Sankhya-Karika” we read how, “like a
_danseuse_ who retires from the dance after she has shown herself
to the crowd, Nature retires after she has shown herself in all her
splendour to the soul”—_after she has shown herself to the soul_. The
aim of the best art is not slavishly to copy Nature, but to catch and
translate the dreams she suggests.

    “Stoop to earth’s service, and behold
    All heaven shall blossom into gold.”

We may paint as much as we like “from imagination” or “inner
consciousness,” but if Nature were not all the time posing at our
elbow, and if we did not from time to time cast covert glances at her
as our model, our picture would never be “inspired”; it would either
harp tediously upon ancient themes and methods, or else “advance” into
sheer chaotic incoherence.

And so it is that we have now come, I think, to a time in the history
and use of Alpine rockworks when we must turn again to Nature for
fresh inspiration, for improved ideals. The time is passing when
Alpine conditions were held to be sufficiently represented by the
rock-fortresses of the Alps,

    “And all the garrisons were flowers.”

Of course, these garrisons are, and must always remain, the most
prominent and unique of vegetation’s Alpine marvels, but they cannot
properly be thought to speak for all; they are, as it were, the
militant _éclaireurs_ set upon the craggy heights and watching over
the peaceful hosts of their fellows upon the fields. As is the way in
all our activities, we hug a truth a long time before becoming aware
that it is not the whole truth. Perception has small beginnings,
advance is slow, and exaggeration, meantime, is the very breath of
progress. We ill-use a truth by over-kindness; our ecstasy forces it
to lie. We dwell extravagantly upon it until it becomes partially
false; then we move on. And this, I find, is what has happened, and
is happening, in the case of Alpine rockworks. We have for long dwelt
alone with them as with the last word upon the housing of Alpine
plants; we have been so absorbed in them as the whole truth, that we
have seen no need, even no possibility, for further helpful inquiry
of Nature. But the time has now arrived when our truth is revealing
itself as only a half-truth, and, turning to glance again at our model
for a fresh advance in inspiration, we notice in her a feature which
had previously escaped us—the fields.

       *       *       *       *       *

“Many people enter God’s Temple through the doorway of Beauty”; and
upon this count, also, the fields of the Alps are of obvious import.
I venture to think that an Alpine field, with all its concomitant
“accident” and consequent variety, will have more to say to a larger
number of men and women than will a rockwork alone; I venture to
think that a person who would not stop longer than to patronise a
rockwork, would stand arrested and absorbed before the grass-lands and
their varied features. To the mass of mortals who are not bespoken
specialists in higher Alpines, the meadows have no superiors in
breadth, directness, and simplicity of appeal. They are places where
the “man-in-the-street” is at once at home. They require no special
enthusiasm to make them acceptable. Their beauty is as apparent to the
“vulgar” as it is to the elect; their charm is interesting to all.

And this interest means more than mere pleasure, more than a
superficial tickling of the senses. It entails a mint of meaning for
the soul. Yes, the soul. No gardener, no Nature-lover, need be shy
of admitting he has a soul; for it is precisely this which makes
Nature-lovers of us all, precisely this which plays so big a part in
our admiration of the fields. “Breathes there a man with soul so dead”
who will not linger lovingly over mountain meadows tossed or rolling
like a multi- sea, with sunlight playing amid the blues,
mauves, reds, and yellows, breaking these into endless intermediary
tints; and with butterflies seemingly in such light-hearted flight,
skipping and flitting blithely, airily, for all the world like flowers
come suddenly to sentient life? Breathes there a man who will not
find in these meadows and their teeming gaiety “a vitalising passion,
calling to life the shrouded thoughts and unsuspected forces of the
heart”?

From Crocus to “Crocus”; from the first pale, dainty flush of spring
to the last full flush of autumn; from the shy and hesitating youth
of the year to the time when all at length “is rounded with a sleep,”
these meadows are an intimate joy and refreshment. Nature herself sets
so much store by them that when they become, as they must become,
recognised components of our Alpine gardens, it shall be said she

    “Now was almost won
    To think her part was done,
    And that her reign had here its last fulfilling.
    She knew such harmony alone
    Could hold all Heaven and Earth in happier unison.”




    “Farewell! farewell to the field,
    Farewell to the sunny lawn!”

                                        SCHILLER, _William Tell_.




INDEX


  A

  _Achillea nana_, 80

  _Aconitum Lycoctonum_, 173

    ”  _napellus_, 121, 173

    ”  _paniculatum_, 173

  _Adenostyles albifrons_, 122, 173

  _Adonis aestivalis_, 69

  _Ajuga pyramidalis_, 31, 77, 83

  Alchemilla, 74

    ”  _alpina_, 83

    ”  _vulgaris_, 83

  Alpine Auricula, 76

    ”  Brier, 85, 105

    ”  Bugle, 83

    ”  Clover, 54, 170, 171

    ”  Crocus, 44

    ”  Crowfoot, 31, 44

    ”  Eglantine, 67, 85, 105, 121

    ”  Flax, 84

    ”  Forget-me-not, 84

    ”  Knotweed, 85

    ”  Lettuce, 122

    ”  London Pride, 176

    ”  Plantain, 76

    ”  Polygala, 31

  _Anemone alpina_, 17, 32

    ”  _narcissiflora_, 63, 83

    ”  _sulphurea_, 83, 128

  _Antennaria dioica_, 84

  _Anthericum Liliago_, 84, 164

    ”  _ramosum_, 84

  _Anthyllis vulneraria_, 77, 84, 116, 170

  Antirrhinum, 78

  _Arabis alpina_, 174

  Arnica, 72, 116, 129, 177

  Artemisia, 77

  Asparagus, 137

  _Aspidium Lonchitis_, 175

  _Aster alpinus_, 89, 124

  _Astrantia major_, 120, 129, 154, 161, 176

    ”  _ minor_, 120

  _Atriplex deltoidea_, 81

  Autumn Crocus, 130, 134-146

  Azalea, 103


  B

  _Bartsia alpina_, 30, 57, 117

  Bastard Toadflax, 116

  Bearded Campanula, 54

    ”  Harebell, 81

  Bell-Gentian, 57, 70, 114

  Berberis, 144, 172

  Bilberry, 129, 144

  Bindweed, 157, 166

  Bird Cherry, 173

  Bird’s-eye Primula, 46, 135

  Bird’s-foot Trefoil, 84

  _Biscutella lævigata_, 31, 57, 84, 115, 164, 177

  Bistort, 63, 74, 85, 115, 120, 164, 176

  Bladder Campion, 85, 165, 167

  Bluebell, 152

  Blue Bottle, 74, 84

  Box-leaved Polygala, 24

  _Bramo-Vaco_, 139

  Brown Gentian, 120

  Bugle, 31, 77

  _Bulbocodium vernum_, 146, 163

  Butcher’s Broom, 137

  Buttercup, 115, 120, 149, 152, 165, 166

  Butterfly Orchis, 72, 85, 104


  C

  _Calamintha alpina_, 31, 116, 174, 177

  _Caltha palustris_, 30, 166

  _Campanula barbata_, 72, 81, 115, 170

    ”  _persicifolia_, 122, 170

    ”  _boidalis_, 84, 115, 158, 160, 165, 176

    ”  _rotundifolia_, 84, 165

    ”  _Scheuchzeri_, 115, 127

    ”  _spicata_, 121, 170

    ”  _thyrsoides_, 121

  Campion, 84, 85

  _Cardamine resedifolia_, 80

  _Carduus defloratus_, 170

  _Carlina acaulis_, 122

    ”  _vulgaris_, 122

  Carthusian Pink, 84

  Catchfly, 84

  Cat’s-ear, 84

  _Centaurea montana_, 84, 164

  _Centaurea nigra_, 165

    ”  _scabiosa_, 120

    ”  _uniflora_, 120, 165

  _Cephalanthera ensifolia_, 85, 173

    ”  _pallens_, 173

    ”  _rubra_, 85, 173

  _Cerastium arvense_, 84

  _Char de Venus_, 121

  Cherry-tree, 17

  _Chrysanthemum leucanthemum_, 165

  Cinquefoil, 77, 85

  Clary, 85, 154

  Clover, 72

  _Cœloglossum viridis_, 85

  _Colchicum alpinum_, 140-146

    ”  _autumnalis_, 130, 134-143, 160, 165

  _Colchique_, 139

  Coltsfoot, 45

  Columbine, 164

  Corn, 118

  Cornflower, 69, 99

  _Coronilla varia_, 122

  Cowslip, 23, 149, 164

  _Crepis aurea_, 115

  Crocus, 23, 24, 71

    ”  _nudiflorus_, 137

    ”  _sativus_, 139

    ”  _vernus_, 163

  Cudweed, 84

  Currant, 17


  D

  Daffodil, 17, 32, 152, 163

  Daisy, 149, 166

  Dandelion, 19, 150, 166

  Daphne, 109

  Dendrobium, 75

  _Dianthus Carthusianorum_, 84, 122

    ”  _neglectus_, 80

  _Dianthus superbus_, 121, 173

    ”  _sylvestris_, 121, 122

  _Digitalis ambigua_, 121

    ”  _lutea_, 122

  Dog Rose, 108, 129

  Dyer’s Weed, 85


  E

  _Echium vulgare_, 84

  Edelweiss, 35-39, 124

  Eglantine, 17, 144

  Epilobium, 80

  _Epipactis atrorubens_, 173

    ”  _latifolia_, 173

  _Eritrichium nanum_, 42

  _Eryngium alpinum_, 170

  _Euphrasia alpina_, 84

    ”  _minima_, 84

    ”  _officinalis_, 72, 73, 84

  Everlasting Pea, 67, 169

  _Exobasidium rhododendri_, 108

  Eyebright, 73, 84


  F

  Fair Maid of France, 85, 115

  False Lily-of-the-Valley, 176

  Felwort, 41

  Field Mouse-ear, 84

  Field Gentian, 120

    ”  Poppy, 68, 99

  Flax, 122

  Foxglove, 152

  French Willow, 80

  Frog Orchis, 85


  G

  Gagea, 163

  Garlic, 137

  _Gentiana amarella_, 41

  _Gentiana asclepiadea_, 90

    ”  _brachyphylla_, 141

    ”  _campestris_, 115, 120

    ”  _excisa_, 24, 89, 157

    ”  _nivalis_, 117, 157

    ”  _punctata_, 120

    ”  _purpurea_, 120

    ”  _verna_, 24, 30, 35-47, 57, 141, 157, 175

  _Geranium, sylvaticum_, 84, 115, 154, 160, 164, 177

  _Geum montanum_, 24, 31

    ”  _rivale_, 84

  Globe-Flower, 23, 56, 85, 164, 176

  _Globularia cordifolia_, 84

  Goat’s Beard, 173

  Golden Thistle, 122

  Grass-of-Parnassus, 127

  Greater Astrantia, 82

  Grimm the Collier, 120

  Groundsel, 80

  _Gymnadenia albida_, 104, 116

    ”  _conopsea_, 85, 164

    ”  _odoratissima_, 85

  _Gypsophila repens_, 174


  H

  _Habenaria bifolia_, 85

    ”  _chlorantha_, 173

    ”  _viridis_, 85

  Hard-heads, 120, 165

  Hawkweed, 82, 120

  Hawthorn, 152

  Heather, 102, 128, 129

  _Helianthemum alpestre_, 116

    ”  _vulgare_, 174

  Helleborine, 85

  Hepatica, 23

  Herb Paris, 137

  _Herbst-Zeitlose_, 140

  _Hieracium alpinum_, 115

    ”  _aurantiacum_, 120

  _Hippocrepis comosa_, 84

  Holly-fern, 175

  Honeysuckle, 109, 121, 173

  Horseshoe Vetch, 84

  _Hypochœris maculata_, 115

    ”  _uniflora_, 115, 165

  Hyssop, 122


  J

  Jacob’s Ladder, 128, 154

  _Jasione montana_, 122, 170

  _Juniperus nana_, 172

  Jupiter’s Distaff, 121


  K

  Kidney Vetch, 77, 84

  King of the Alps, 42

  Knapweed, 84

  Knee Holly, 137

  Knobweed, 120

  Knotweed, 85


  L

  Laburnum, 17

  Ladies’ Fingers, 84

  Lady’s Mantle, 83

    ”  Smock, 80

  _Laitue des Alpes_, 122

  Larkspur, 69

  _Laserpitium latifolium_, 173

  _Lathyrus heterophyllus_, 84, 170

    ”  _luteus_, 173

    ”  _sylvestris_, 84

  _Le Bas du Bon Dieu_, 41

  _Leontopodium alpinum_, 35-39

  Leopard’s Bane, 122

  Lesser Foxglove, 122

  _Lilium croceum_, 17, 173

    ”  _Martagon_, 173

  Lily-of-the-Valley, 137

  _Linaria alpina_, 77

  _Linum alpinum_, 84, 164, 170

    ”  _tenuifolium_, 122, 170

  Lœlia, 75

  _Lonicera alpigena_, 173

    ”  _nigra_, 173

  _Lotus corniculatus_, 84

  Lousewort, 85

  _Lychnis dioica_, 84, 161, 164, 176

    ”  _Flos-cuculi_, 84, 164

    ”  _viscaria_, 84, 161


  M

  Marguerite, 75

  Marsh-Marigold, 30, 46, 57, 71, 166, 167

  Martagon Lily, 116, 120, 165, 173

  Masterwort, 120, 154

  May Lily, 176

  Meadow Clary, 85, 154, 165

    ”  Rue, 121

    ”  Saffron, 139

    ”  Sage, 85, 154

  Mealy Primrose, 46, 56, 71, 135

  _Mespilus oxyacantha_, 79

  _Meum athamanticum_, 173

  Micheli’s Daisy, 30, 57, 72

  Milkwort, 85

  Monkshood, 121, 169

  Mountain Cornflower, 84

    ”  Everlasting Pea, 84

    ”  Geum, 71

  _Mulgedium alpinum_, 122, 173

  Mullein, 122

  _Muscari comosum_, 84, 164

  Myosotis, 24, 177

    ”  _alpestris_, 84, 164

    ”  _palustris_, 116


  N

  Naked Boy, 139

    ”  Lucy, 139

  _Narcissus poeticus_, 17, 32, 158, 164

    ”  _Pseudo-narcissus_, 163

  Nettle, 166

  _Nigritella nigra_, 85

  Nottingham Catchfly, 167


  O

  Oak-apple, 108

  _Œil-de-chat_, 41

  Onion, 137

  _Onobrychis viciæfolia_, 84, 170

  Ononis, 93

    ”  _natrix_, 122, 170

    ”  _rotundifolia_, 122

  Orache, 81

  Orchids, 23, 72, 85, 116, 120, 149, 158, 166, 177

  _Orchis conopsea_, 164

    ”  _latifolia_, 85

    ”  _maculata_, 85, 164

    ”  _mascula_, 164

    ”  _Morio_, 164

    ”  _ustulata_, 85

  _Ornithogalum nutans_, 164

    ”  _pyrenaicum_, 137

    ”  _umbellatum_, 138, 163

  _Orobus luteus_, 121

  Ox-eye Marguerite, 116, 165, 166, 176

  Oxlip, 164


  P

  <DW29>, 69

  Paradise Lily, 63, 72, 85, 158, 164, 177

  _Paradisia Liliastrum_, 85, 158, 164

  Parsley-fern, 175

  Parsnip, 152

  _Pedicularis tuberosa_, 31, 85

  Pheasant-eye Narcissus, 32, 164

  _Phyteutma betonicifolium_, 54, 85, 115, 158, 165, 167

    ”  _hemisphæricum_, 116

    ”  _Micheli_, 116

    ”  _orbiculare_, 85, 115, 165

    ”  _spicata_, 154

  _Pimpinella magna rosea_, 85

  Pinguicula, 30

  Pink, 169

  Pinkwort, 80

  _Plantago alpina_, 54

  Plantain, 157, 166

  _Plantanthera bifolia_, 85

    ”  _chlorantha_, 173

  _Poa alpina_, 171

  _Polemonium cœruleum_, 127, 154, 165

  _Polygala alpestris_, 85

    ”  _vulgaris_, 85

  _Polygonatum verticillatum_, 173

  _Polygonum Bistorta_, 85, 164

  _Polystichum Filix-mas_, 175

  Poppy, 68, 99

  _Potentilla rupestris_, 31, 77, 85, 115, 164, 177

  Primrose, 23, 37, 46, 93, 152

  _Primula farinosa_, 30, 62, 167

  _Prunus avium_, 173


  Q

  Queen of the Fields, 121


  R

  Radish, 118

  Ragged Robin, 84, 164

  Rampion, 54, 85, 115, 120, 154, 165, 167

  _Ranunculus aconitifolius_, 85, 115, 164, 167

    ”  _acris_, 165, 166

    ”  _bulbosus_, 165, 166

  Raspberry, 17

  Red Catchfly, 84, 164

  _Reseda luteola_, 85

  Rest-Harrow, 93

  _Rhinanthus angustifolius_, 85

  _Rhododendron ferrugineum_, 41, 89, 102-113, 117, 129, 144, 172

    ”  _hirsutum_, 102-113

    ”  _ponticum_, 102

  Robin’s Pincushion, 108

  _Rosa alpina_, 85, 105, 172

    ”  _pomifera_, 172

  _Rosage_, 106

  _Rose des Alpes_, 106

  _Rue des Alpes_, 106


  S

  Saffron, 139

  _Safra dès prats_, 139

  Sage, 77, 85

  Sainfoin, 84, 170

  St. Bruno’s Lily, 85, 114

  _Salvia glutinosa_, 121, 173

    ”  _pratensis_, 69, 74, 77, 85, 115, 154, 158, 160, 164, 176

  _Sambucus racemosa_, 172

  _Saponaria ocymoides_, 31, 77, 116, 174

  _Saxifraga cuneifolia_, 176

  Saxifrage, 169

  _Scabiosa lucida_, 85, 115

  Scilla, 23

    ”  _bifolia_, 163

  Sedum, 77, 129, 169, 170

  Sempervivum, 169, 170

  _Senecio Doronicum_, 80, 122

  _Sibbaldia procumbens_, 54

  _Silene Cucubalus_, 165, 167

    ”  _inflata_, 85

    ”  _nutans_, 167

    ”  _rupestris_, 116, 174

  _Smilacina bifolia_, 176

  Snake-root, 85

  Snakeweed, 164

  Snapdragon, 78

  Soapwort, 77

  Soldanella, 23, 24, 71, 89, 175

  Solomon’s Seal, 173

  Sorrel, 151, 166

  Speedwell, 9, 73

  _Spirœa Aruncua_, 121, 173

  Star of Bethlehem, 137, 163

  Strawberry, 17

  Stonecrop, 77

  Sulphur Anemone, 31, 34, 46, 53, 54

  Sylvan Geranium, 63


  T

  _Thalictrum aquilegifolium_, 121, 169, 173

  _Thesium alpinum_, 72, 74, 116

  Thyme, 118

  Toadflax, 77

  Trefoil Valerian, 85

  _Trifolium alpinum_, 54, 170, 171

  _Trollius europæus_, 85, 164

  _Tue-chien_, 139

  Turk’s-cap Lily, 121


  U

  Umbelliferæ, 116, 165

  _Umbilicaria virginis_, 46


  V

  _Vache_, 139

  _Valeriana montana_, 122

    ”  _tripteris_, 85

  Vanilla Orchis, 85

  _Veilleuse_, 139

  _Veillotte_, 139

  _Veratrum album_, 116, 158

  _Verbascum phlomoides_, 122, 170

  Vernal Gentian, 35-47, 58, 72, 104, 127

  _Veronica Chamædrys_, 73

    ”  _saxatilis_, 116, 171

    ”  _spicata_, 158

    ”  _urticæfolia_, 170

  _Vicia onobrychioides_, 121, 170

  _Viola alpina_, 175

    ”  _calcarata_, 32, 41, 53, 89, 157

    ”  _tricolor_, 69

  Violet, 23, 164

  _Violon_, 139

  Viper’s Bugloss, 84


  W

  Water Avens, 84

  Weld, 85

  Willow Gentian, 90

    ”   Herb, 129

  Wood Anemone, 23

    ” Campion, 84

    ” Crane’s-bill, 84, 154, 165

    ” Everlasting Pea, 84

    ” Sorrel, 175

  Wormwood, 77


  Y

  Yarrow, 80

  Yellow Eyebright, 84

    ”  Foxglove, 121

    ”  Gentian, 116

    ”  Lousewort, 85

    ”  Rattle, 85, 116

    ”  Violet, 45, 176




PRINTED BY

HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,

LONDON AND AYLESBURY.




  ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │ Transcriber's Note:                                               │
  │                                                                   │
  │ The original spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation have been     │
  │ retained, with the exception of apparent typographical errors     │
  │ which have been corrected without note.                           │
  │                                                                   │
  │ Word combinations that appeared with and without hyphens were     │
  │ changed to the predominant form if it could be determined.        │
  │                                                                   │
  │ Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.             │
  │                                                                   │
  │ Italicized words are surrounded by underline characters, _like    │
  │ this_.                                                            │
  │                                                                   │
  │ Mid-paragraph illustrations have been moved between paragraphs    │
  │ and some illustrations have been moved closer to the text that    │
  │ references them. The List of Illustrations paginations were       │
  │ changed accordingly.                                              │
  │                                                                   │
  │ Other corrections:                                                │
  │   Page 16: Ansel changed to Ancel (‘the Pas d’Encel.”)            │
  │   Page 129: prom e changed to promise (“showing promise of a      │
  │   fiery autumn.”)                                                 │
  └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Flower-Fields of Alpine Switzerland, by 
George Flemwell

*** 