ALPINE FLOWERS AND ROCK-GARDENS. 139 



tains are often " bare," and cliffs devoid of soil ; but we must not 

 suppose that the choice jewellery of plant-life scattered over the ribs 

 of the mountain lives upon little more than the air and the melting 

 snow. Where else can we find such a depth of stony soil as on the 

 ridges of shattered stone and grit flanking some great glacier, stained 

 with tufts of crimson Rockfoil? Can we gauge the depth of that 

 chink from which peep tufts of the beautiful little Androsace helvetica, 

 which for ages has gathered the crumbling grit, into which the roots 

 enter so far that we cannot dig them out ? And if we find plants grow- 

 ing from mere cracks without soil, even then the roots simply search 

 farther into the heart of the flaky rock, so that they are safer from 

 drought than on the level ground. 



We meet on the Alps plants not more than an inch high firmly 

 rooted in crevices of slaty rock, and by knocking away the sides from 

 bits of projecting rock, and laying the roots quite bare, we may find 

 them radiating in all directions against a flat rock, some of the 

 largest perhaps more than a yard long. Even smaller plants descend 

 quite as deep, though it is rare to find the texture and position of the 

 rock such as will admit of tracing them. It is true we occasionally 

 find in fields of flat hard rock hollows in which moss and leaves have 

 gathered, and where, in a depression of the surface, without an outlet 

 of any kind, alpine plants grow freely ; but in droughts they are 

 just as liable to suffer from want of water as they would be in 

 our plains. On level or sloping spots of ground in the Alps the 

 earth is of great depth, and, if it is not all earth in the common 

 sense of the word, it is more suitable to the plants than what we 

 commonly understand by that term. Stones of all sizes broken 

 up with the soil, sand, and grit prevent evaporation ; the roots lap 

 round them, follow them down, and in such positions they never 

 suffer from want of moisture. It must be remembered that the 

 continual degradation of the rocks effected by frost, snow, and 

 heavy rains in summer serves to " earth up," so to speak, many 

 alpine plants. 



In numbers of gardens an attempt at " rockwork " has been made ; 

 but the result is often ridiculous, not because it is puny when com- 

 pared with Nature's work, but because it is generally so arranged 

 that rock-plants cannot exist upon it. The idea of rockwork first 

 arose from a desire to imitate those natural croppings-out of rocks 

 which are often half covered with dwarf mountain plants. The con- 

 ditions which surround these are rarely taken into account by those 

 who make rock-gardens. In moist districts, where rains keep porous 

 stone in a humid state, this straight-sided rockwork may support a 

 few plants, but in the larger portion of the British Isles it is useless 

 and ugly. It is not alone because they love the mountain air 



