240 THE ALPINE FLORA 



In a word the question of the acclimatisation of alpine 

 flora has ceased to be one of mystery for practical garden- 

 ers. Their culture has taken a place in our life, and its 

 special devotees are the people of taste, of refined and ar- 

 tistic temper. 



The Duke of Argyll, when presiding in 1867 at a 

 meeting of English horticulturists, told how Queen Vic- 

 toria as she walked once with him on the Scottish hills, 

 gathered the mountain flowers and confessed a passion 

 for them. He added that if gardeners won their way to 

 tame every kind of plant, still the fairest of them all, the 

 people of the high hills would be rebels. He was wrong; 

 were Her Gracious Majesty alive to-day, she might 

 admire on the terraces of Windsor Castle almost the 

 whole of our alpine flora, acclimatised at Floraire and 

 moved to Windsor by the careful efforts of a distin- 

 guished amateur, General Sir Deighton Probyn, Keeper 

 of the Privy Purse to His Majesty the late King of 

 England. 



ffttpine (gardens and ffioc/cer/es 



We have seen that the system of building rockeries 

 for the accomodation of mountain plants dates, at least in 

 Switzerland, from the moment when Boissier opened his 

 rock-garden at Valleyres (between i852 and 1870). 

 About the same time the botanist A. Kerner, Director of 

 the Innsbruck Botanical Garden, laid out, for the cultiva- 

 tion of the flora of the Tyrolese Alps, an elaborately 

 planned model, both in their forms and in their compo- 

 sition, of the eight mountain masses of Tyrol. Where the 

 object in view is scientific, such an arrangement is most 



