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.

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-slopes 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

But if such eulogy ever were permissible it would be so of Champex and her flower-strewn fields and slopes 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

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.

THE MAY FIELDS

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 slope 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 slopes 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,

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):

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.

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—

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 slopes 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 slopes, 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-coloured 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-slopes 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 slopes 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 slopes of that district are not the only slopes in the Alps which might be “visible for miles away.”

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 slopes 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.

THE VERNAL GENTIAN

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 slopes 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:

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-slope 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,

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

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.

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-coloured, 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-coloured 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:

—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 slope 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 slopes 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 slope 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 slope 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-coloured 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 slope 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 slope 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, coerulean 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?

IN STORM AND SHINE

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.”

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 slopes, 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:

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?

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!

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:

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

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,

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—

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

THE JUNE MEADOWS

“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.

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-coloured 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 slopes 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 slopes 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 slopes and fields as we could find anywhere. Starting amid rolling hectares of Orchids and Lilies, passing along wide slopes 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-coloured 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 coloured 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 slopes—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 slope 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 slope, 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 Pansy 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 slope 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 slopes 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:

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 slopes 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:

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 Loelia 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. ‘Dodonoeus’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.

But let us not stand haggling over such contentious matter. Revenons À nos moutons!

Scanning these fields and slopes, 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:

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,

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

ON FLORAL ATTRACTIVENESS AND COLOUR

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?

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 slope 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 slopes 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:

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 coloured 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—

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 negro 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.”

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 coloured 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.

THE RHODODENDRON

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 slopes 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

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-coloured 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 slope. 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 JULY FIELDS

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.

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 slopes the now declining Biscutella and Strawberry-flowered Potentilla have for new companions Hieracium alpinum, Hypochoeris maculata, Crepis aurea, Campanula barbata, and C. Scheuchzeri, the tall lemon-yellow Hypochoeris 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-coloured 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,

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

“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-coloured 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 slopes 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 slopes, 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.

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 slopes 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

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 coeruleum, 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; Zygoena 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!

The fields are bald, the slopes 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 coloured 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 Pansy 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

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.

THE AUTUMN CROCUS

Perhaps the only flower to bless, and bless again, the passage of the scythe over the damp slopes 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!”

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.

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-coloured, 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 slope 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 slope 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:

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.

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 slopes; 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”

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

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.”