Plants in the Arctic- Alpine Environment^ 



By Stanwyn G. Shetler 



Department of Botany, Museum of Natural History 

 Smithsonian Institution 



[With 12 plates] 



Anyone who has ever climbed a high mountain to that windswept 

 zone where forest shrinks and hesitatingly defers to tortured scrub; 

 who then has scrambled on to fresh green meadows gay with splashy 

 little herbs; and who finally has picked his way, perhaps on hands 

 and knees, up treacherous rubble slopes to the last rock pinnacles and 

 ledges where tiny drabas and top-heavy bellflowers cling so pre- 

 cariously to crevice and scree — he it is who knows the Alpine in all 

 its splendor and spell with its hostile yet come-hither appeal. Poet, 

 philosopher, naturalist, scientist, or layman — no one who has beheld 

 the Alpine, whether on this continent or that, can fail to wonder 

 how, amidst the primitive ferocity of this enviromnent w'here life 

 itself seems most improbable, a plant — any plant — not only survives 

 but thrives. Yet year in and year out these alpine dwarfs, tender 

 but tenacious, manage to stay alive and to reproduce their kind, 

 though they lease life day by day or even hour by hour. Truly, this 

 is biological intrigue of compelling dimension. 



To those who have known the Arctic, however, the Alpine is but 

 an overture. Forbidding though the elements of the Alpine may 

 be, the Arctic can in all points be more hostile and unforgiving. 

 The Alpine, if you will, is but a junior version of the Arctic. It 

 is like a small enclave of the Arctic outside the Arctic, which has 

 gained by altitude what it has lost by latitude — ^but not quite. The 

 Arctic is a contiguous region around the North Pole, but the Alpine 

 is fragmented into a thousand parcels, of greater or lesser area, held 

 in common by all the higher mountains of the world, yet abruptly 

 disjunct from each other because of the more moderate conditions of 

 the intervening lower elevations. For a given latitude, the higher 

 the mountain the more authentic its imitation of the Arctic, other 



1 Based on a paper read before the annual meeting of the Biological Society of Wash- 

 ington, June 7, 1963, as a part of a symposium on the "Adaptations of Plants and Animals 

 to Their Environment." 



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