234 THE GARDENER. [May 



most deserved popularity. One thing is quite certain, that in the future of popu- 

 lar gardening, Alpine flowers will play an important part, to the great advantage 

 of practical horticulture. 



This is the best book Mr Robinson has yet written, and we welcome it as a 

 standard work on Alpine flowers. It is divided into two parts, the first of which 

 treats, in the first place, of the culture of Alpine flowers in the rock-garden, in 

 beds, and in pots ; and, in the second place, of a " Little Tour in the Alps," made 

 by Mr Robinson in search of information respecting the flowers of which he 

 writes. The practical cultivator will derive many valuable hints from the first, 

 while the general reader, as well as the practical horticulturist, will thoroughly 

 enjoy the second. The second part is occupied with descriptions of a large 

 number of species and varieties of Alpine flowers, many of them written in a very 

 pleasant manner, and rarely descending to the ordinary level of any details in 

 which such descriptive notes are usually written. Such is a bare outline of the 

 work, which is supplemented by descriptive lists of Alpine and Rock plants, &c, 

 and a copious index. 



In a well-written introduction of ten pages, Mr Robinson puts in an eloquent 

 plea for a better appreciation, and a more extended culture, of Alpine flowers. 

 The author asks, " What are Alpine plants ? The word Alpine is here used in 

 an arbitrary sense to define the vegetation that grows naturally on the most ele- 

 vated regions of the earth — on all very high mountain-chains, whether they spring 

 from hot tropical plains or green northern pastures. Above the cultivated land 

 these flowers begin to occur on the fringes of the stately woods ; they are seen in 

 multitudes in the vast and delightful pastures with which many great mountain- 

 chains are robed, enamelling their soft verdure with innumerable dyes, and where 

 neither grass nor loose herbage can exist — where feeble world-heat and world- 

 force are quenched and discomfited on their own ground by mightier powers — 

 where mountains are crumbled into ghastly slopes of shattered rock by contend- 

 ing throbbings of heat and cold, and where the very water becomes hard and re- 

 lentless as stone, yet bears and moves thousands of tons of rock as easily as the 

 Gulf Stream carries a seed — even there they modestly, but brilliantly and bravely, 

 spring from Nature's ruined battle-ground, as if the mother of earth-life had 

 sent up her sweetest and loveliest children to plead with the fell spirits of 

 destruction." 



" Alpine plants fringe the vast fields of snow and ice of the high hills, and at 

 great elevations have often scarcely time to flower and ripen a few seeds before 

 they are again imbedded ; while sometimes, if the previous year's snow has been 

 very heavy, and the present year's sun is weak, numbers of these may remain 

 beneath the surface for more than a year. Enormous areas of ground, inhabited 

 by Alpine plants, are every year covered by a deep bed of snow. Where the tall 

 tree or shrub cannot exist from the intense cold, a deep soft mass of downy snow 

 settles upon these minute plants, like a great cloud-borne quilt, under which they 

 rest untortured by the alternation of frost and biting wind, with moist, balmy, 

 and spring-like days." 



And it is about these flowers, flourishing amid such apparently inhospitable in- 

 fluences, that the author discourses, with a genial regard for them ; and this self- 

 same regard he infuses into his readers, as they follow him along the pleasant 

 pages of his book. We hope, ere long, to return to the book, and give some 

 passages from it, together with some of the illustrations bo profusely dotted 

 about it. 



