THE ABUSE AND PROTECTION OF ALPINES 



Orchids surely Switzerland could do for its Alpines. 

 Culling an apt phrase from * Major Barbara ': 

 ' Morality that doesn't fit the facts" scrap " it !' ; 

 and this the Society for the Protection of Plants 

 set itself to accomplish, with the result that to-day 

 the rapacious vandal is virtually stamped out. 



The Society and its offshoots, the gardens, have 

 also dealt most effectively with the unthinking 

 habits of the peasant, who sought to enrich himself 

 by selling rudely uprooted rarities on the markets 

 or among the hotels by, in fact, killing the goose 

 which laid the golden eggs. He has been brought 

 to see that it is better all-round policy to cultivate 

 the plants from seeds ; and this he has begun to do 

 in, for example, the district around the Saleve, near 

 Geneva. His customers, also, have learnt some 

 wisdom, now recognizing more or less that plants 

 so raised are far better worth buying than the poor, 

 withered, mutilated specimens carelessly uprooted 

 from the mountains. Indeed, under the old condi- 

 tions, these customers foolishly paid four or five 

 times the catalogue price of sound, acclimatized 

 roots and bulbs for maimed and half-dead plants 

 roughly snatched, often forty-eight hours or more 

 previously, from their wild home. Then, again, 

 local authorities in many parts of the country have 



