INTRODUCTION. 
encourages, elicits, and ripens. The high alpines have to face 
a keener competition for insect favour, too, than prevails in the 
bee- and butterfly-crowded Alps beneath; fewer are the winged 
visitors of the upper shingles, each plant has to cry shrilly against 
its rivals “come here, come here”; colour is their call, and so 
their whole surrounding chain of circumstances combines to press 
them into brilliance and inspire them; scent is but rarely used, 
though some of the highest Crucifers and Valerians excel in it, 
and even Eritrichium has a little haunting honeyed breath of 
its own. 
Consider, then, the change to conditions of cultivation in our 
gardens. Different parts of the country vary in the matter of 
humidity, but, for a general rule, the English winter is one long 
succession of clogging damps, while the English summer, even 
when hot and bright, is apt to be arid and choking with thirst. 
But thirst is a state unknown to the children of the hills, and even 
more abhorrent and strange to them are our long, wet, open winters, 
dank and corrupting. Many of them, too, in their high clear 
places, have developed a fine coat of fur to garner all the damps 
of the air in the summer sunlight of the Alps, secured as they are 
against excess of moisture while they sleep, by the complete dry- 
ness and uniform temperature of the packed pure coverlid of 
snow beneath which they sit at rest in the unrelaxing grasp of 
the alpine winter. But in our lachrymose midnight of the season 
they are alternately rained upon and snowed upon, tugged out of 
the ground, soaked and sodden again, till the downy cushion 
becomes a dead sponge of decay, and the bare straggled roots 
across the sloughy ground have nothing but a rotten corpse to 
sustain. From all this preface as to their habits, then, springs 
one absolute and vital rule in the cultivation of mountain plants : 
No well-drained alpine can easily be kept too damp in summer ; 
no alpine can ever possibly be kept too dry in winter. 
The devising of means towards these ends is the test of the 
cultivator’s zeal and ingenuity. At the same time it must be 
understood that though this rule is general and absolute, it is 
only stringent in the case of the most difficult and downy high 
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