THE FLOWERS OF THE ALPS
The Swiss Alps have their chief worshippers in the summer for the
climbing, in the winter for the sports. A few insist that the rich
colouring of autumn is the best season of all. A larger and a growing
number visit the Alps in the spring for the flowers. They are wise,
for truly the sight of an Alpine meadow in bloom is the most joyous
manifestation of Nature in a sunny mood that man can know. Whether it
be that the flowers, fertilised by the detritus which the winter's
snow has brought to their roots, are really more luxuriant and
brighter in colour than the same flowers in a garden or a woodland
dell of the plains; or that the clear air and the contrast with the
white snow around make them seem more brilliant--Alpine flowers shine
out with an exquisite and star-like grace that can be noted nowhere
else; and the green of Alpine grass seems of a clear brightness that
no other herbage can rival.
The nearness to the snow has certainly an effect in enhancing the
charm of these Alpine meadows. The flowers, wearing the colours of the
sun, rush bravely to the very edge of the snow-fields as though they
were jostling the winter aside. The white has barely disappeared
before there is green and gold and red to give cheerful greeting to
the spring sky, and declare another foot of territory won from the
frost. Indeed, if you will look closely at the line of the retreating
snow--not a straight line but a billowy one, here receding into a big
bay, here stubbornly holding out a promontory of white--you will note
that the crevellated edge of the vanishing snow mass is not joined to
the earth at all, but forms a little overhanging cliff of ice. The
melting warmth is coming up from the ground rather than from the sun
in the last stage of the snow-field's flight, and underneath this tiny
cliff the vegetation can be seen already pushing up to life.
The lower Alps in April and May flaunt first the gay banners of the
crocus, which "breaks like fire" over the ground as soon as the
chains of the ice are broken. But other flowers are but little in the
rear, and the snow has scarce gone before under the pine woods there
is a carpet of the mauve-blue hepatica, in the gorges the yellow and
white of the snowflakes and the red of the sticky primrose, over the
meadows the white and purple of the soldanella and the celestial blue
of the spring gentian, while the marshes flaunt their marigolds and
the rose-red bird's-eye primrose. It is a blaze of rich colour, and
yet (to quote Mr. G. Flemwell's work on Alpine flowers):
The steel-blue of winter is still in the air--indeed, one feels
it in the very flowers. Even though no snowy Alp be in sight,
and nothing but floral gaiety around, there is yet a sense of
austerity. The vegetation, though colourfull, is neither coarse
nor rank, nor even luxurious, as judged by English standard.
Nature is crisp and brisk; the air is thin and clear;
everywhere is great refinement, quite other than that of spring
in England. It were as though the severity of the struggle for
existence could be read in the sweet face of things, just as we
may often read it in the smiling face of some chastened human
being--lines of sweetness running side by side with lines of
acute capacity; a strong face beautiful; a face in which
optimism reigns sovereign over an active pessimism. Nature in
the Alps is instinct with the stern necessity for perpetual
endeavour, whereas in England, where conditions are not so
harsh, we have a sense of a certain indolence and ease of
circumstance of Nature which we call homeliness and repose.
Repose, in this sense, there certainly is not in the Alpine
spring. Every suspicion of lassitude or _laissez-faire_ is
unknown; all is keen and buoyant, quick with an earnest _joie
de vivre_ which is as exquisite in its way as anything more
voluptuously sentimental that England can produce.
Following fast upon the earlier flowers come the anemones, the
rhododendrons, the ranunculi, the forget-me-nots, the Alpine roses,
the saxifrages, the violets, the pinks, the heaths, the orchids, St.
Bruno's lily, the daffodils, and a score of other blossoms. The feast
of colour is spread, day after day, in varying shades, but with
unvarying richness, until there comes the time when with another riot
of colour the herdsmen enter into the field with their cattle, or the
scythes lay all prostrate for the winter hay.
Whilst the best of the Alpine spring shows of flowers are in April and
May on the lower and richer Alpine meadows, one may follow the banners
of _primavera_ up the mountains, almost until August, encountering on
the higher levels later seasons. Writing from Zermatt as late as the
end of July, a correspondent to the _Morning Post_ chronicled:
[Illustration: HEPATICA IN THE WOODS AT BEX.]
The dog roses, the brilliantly pink sweet briar, the willow
herb, also of a praeternatural brilliance owing to the altitude,
still make gay the Zermatt Valley, while the last of the
martagon lilies are being mown ruthlessly down by the peasants
in their hayfields. Everywhere on the rocks the red house leeks
and other plants of the stonecrop, saxifrage, and sedum
varieties are appearing; while the mountain pinks, arnica, and
Alpine asters grow almost down into the village itself. For
some reason the flower-plunderer has either stayed his hand in
this valley or has passed it by, for here several of the rarer
and choicer sorts of Alpine blossoms, almost extinct, or at
least very rare in most parts of Switzerland, are still
flourishing. Martagon lilies, for instance, are common, though
how long they will remain so I cannot say. The paths are often
literally bordered with the true Alpine rose, deepest crimson
in hue. Many a meadow is purple and gold with the starry
flowers of the Alpine aster, common here as a field daisy; many
a rock slope is overgrown with mountain pinks; while as for the
_arnica montana_, the rhododendrons, and the creeping
gypsophila, I have never seen anything like them elsewhere. The
arnica covers whole slopes and carpets woods until the ground
is oranged completely over with its blossoms; the creeping
gypsophila clothes the bare rocks and borders the paths with
its tufts of white and pale pink flowers; and the rhododendrons
make the semi-shaded slopes beneath the larches almost a sheet
of rosy-red. Somewhere, too, the true Alpine columbine must be
growing plentifully. I have not discovered it, but I have, I am
sorry to say, seen great handfuls of this loveliest of Alpine
flowers being brought down from the Zermatt slopes.
At one altitude or another, indeed, there are few Alpine
flowers which are not to be found somewhere in the Zermatt
range during this month of July. Certain damp-loving species,
such as campanulas and orchis and the whole primula family, are
certainly less well represented here than in the rainier
Bernese Oberland, yet still there are entire slopes pale blue
with the bearded campanula, and more than one kind of primula
is to be found still in bloom high up or in the crevices of
rocks, while the slopes at the head of the Zermatt valley are
even now covered with Alpine and sub-Alpine blossoms of a
variety and brilliance which I have never seen excelled and
seldom equalled. The short grass above eight thousand feet or
thereabouts is blue with Alpine forget-me-nots or mauve with
pansies, starred with the small gentian, or patched with the
pink of the "marmot's bread" (_silene_); higher up, to 11,000
feet and more, _ranunculus glacialis_ and the hardiest and
lowest-growing flowers are still blooming; while slightly lower
down, especially where there is the moisture of streams and the
shelter of rocks, grow fields of _arnica montana_, pinks,
asters, geums, rock roses, sweet alyssum, sedums, _semper
vivum_, arabis, Alpine toadflax, louseworts, wild thyme,
edelweiss, rampions, Alpine clovers in great variety,
gypsophila, even stray orchis and primulae, the dominant tones
being orange and pale yellow, thrown into relief by the many
mauves and the bright pinks and creamy whites.
The Alpine flowers, in addition to their spectacular beauty, have a
very definite scientific botanical interest. It has been observed that
the magnificence and profusion of flower, in comparison with the
size, of the Alpine plants is a trait of beauty with a charming
scientific explanation. To the Alpine flowers more urgently than to
most races of mortal things, Nature whispers "Carpe Diem." Life for
them must be very, very short. Its length is inexorably decreed by the
snows of winter. The Alpine plant, feeling the renewing warmth of the
spring, must rush at once into flower, as brilliant, as attractive, as
irresistible flower as it may, so that fertilising bees and
butterflies will come and ensure the next generation.
On the same principle, at the opposite end of the pole, the desert
plants store up their seeds in extraordinarily thick and strong
capsules, so that they may rest safely through many seasons of fierce
drought, awaiting the coming of water to fertilise them. In Australia
the desert flowers, such as Sturt's Desert Pea, will come up after
good rains in places where to the knowledge of man they have not grown
for many years; and of some wild Australian plants the seeds need to
be roasted before they will germinate.
Accepting that the remarkable beauty and richness of flowering of
Alpine plants is the response to Nature's stern conditions of
existence, there seems to lurk in the flowers, as in the people of
Switzerland, a moral for those gentle enthusiasts who would do away
with the cruelty of the struggles between nations and between classes,
and set up conditions of universal peace and of general Communism.
Perhaps, alas, it will be found, if ever those ideals are carried far
into practice, that without struggle the human race will deteriorate,
and with too easy conditions of life will tend to decay. I would not
push the case too far, but it is worth recording as a fact, if not an
argument, that when the Alpine dweller fertilises artificially a
meadow the flowers tend to disappear. Conditions of life have been
made too easy, and sterility follows.
Alpine flowers, again conforming themselves skilfully to the
conditions of their existence, send roots down to astonishing depths.
A little tuft or rosette of leaves, the size round of a five-shilling
piece, will often have a system of roots extending a foot or more down
into the soil or into the depths of some crevice in the rock. These
roots are the plants' larders and storerooms. Buried often for some
nine months in the year beneath the snow, the plants need must have
well-stocked larders to draw upon. Sometimes, even, it may be years
before they see the sun and breathe the mountain air again. It is not
every summer that the sun has power to rid the sheltered little Alpine
valleys of the winter snow; often must a plant wait in patience for at
least two years before it can bring forth flowers, and take a new
supply of life from the sun.
[Illustration: ALPINE GARDEN (_LA LINNEA_) At Bourg St. Pierre, on the
road to the Grand St. Bernard, at the beginning of August.]
Apart from winning grateful hymns for their beauty, and interesting
the botanist by their curiosities of structure, some of the flowers
peculiar to the Alps (or to Alpine regions) have, because of their
rarity, inspired a sport of flower-hunting, the more keenly
appreciated when it is associated with danger. Since this
flower-hunting leads to the destruction of rare species and to some
loss of human life, it seems to have a strong hostile case to answer,
especially as the rare Alpines are now cultivated by the florists, and
you may have, for example, edelweiss grown by the gardeners around
Paris. Yet deaths ascribable to "gathering edelweiss" continue to be
recorded. The edelweiss is accepted as the typical Swiss Alpine
flower, but it is not at all peculiar to the Swiss Alps, and is found
in Siberia, Japan, the Himalayas, and the New Zealand Alps. It is
fond of growing in the crevices of precipitous rock faces, but can be
found in safer places, including the commercial florists' rockeries.
The Swiss Alps are very rich in medicinal plants. There is the aconite
plant, much favoured in homoeopathic doses for the cure of colds and
fevers, very efficacious to put an end to "life's fitful fever" if
used in a strong dose; the arnica plant, sovereign remedy for bruises,
its leaves used by the peasants in place of tobacco for smoking; the
gentian, which makes a famous tonic bitter, much employed by doctors
for the _malade imaginaire_, since it has a most convincingly bitter
taste, and may be trusted to do no harm if it does no good; the
meadow-rue, used as a specific against jaundice and malarial fever;
and the Carline thistle, which was said to have been used as a plague
specific by Charlemagne.
It is pleasant to note that the practical Swiss recognise the
necessity of guarding the flower life as well as the forest life of
their land. There is a Swiss "Association for the Protection of
Plants," formed in 1883, which sets itself to two tasks, that of
discouraging vandals who recklessly destroy plant life, and that of
setting up shelter gardens where Alpine flowers may be collected and
strictly preserved. Some of the Canton authorities help the work of
the Society by enforcing close seasons for certain plants. The
_jardins refuges_ set up by the Society are not the least valuable of
the means adopted for preserving one of the great natural beauties of
the country; and these gardens, where are collected as in a botanical
park as many specimens as possible of Alpine _flora_, give interesting
objectives for special expeditions. The chief of these Alpine
botanical gardens are at the Pont de Nant near Bex, at Rochers de Naye
above Montreux, and at Bourg St. Pierre on the Grand St. Bernard.
These gardens are at widely differing altitudes, and each one is at
its best at a different season of the year.
But if one has no fever of botanical curiosity the best way after all
to know the Alpine flowers is in the mass, with the crocus and the
gentian in their vivid green settings flaunting the spring in the face
of the snow-fields.