2 ALPINE FLOWERS [PART I. 



choice jewellery of plant life scattered over the ribs of the 

 mountain, or growing out of the crag and crevice, lives upon 

 little more than the mountain air and the melting snow. 

 Where shall we find such a depth of well-ground stony soil, and 

 withal such perfect drainage, as on the ridges of debris flanking 

 some great glacier, stained all over with tufts of crimson 

 Saxifrage? That narrow chink, from which peep tufts of 

 the beautiful Androsace helvetica, has for ages gathered the 

 crumbling grit and scanty soil, into which the roots enter far. 

 If we find plants growing from mere cracks without soil, the 

 roots simply search farther into the heart of the flaky rock, so 

 that they are safer from any want of moisture than in the 

 deepest soil. 



We find on the Alps plants not more than an inch high, and 

 so firmly rooted in crevices of half-rotten slaty rock that any 

 attempt to take them out would be futile. But, by knocking 

 away the sides from some isolated bits of projecting rock, we 

 may lay bare the roots and find them radiating in all directions 

 against a flat rock, some of them a yard long. We think it 

 rapacious of the Ash, a forest tree, to send its roots under the 

 walls of our gardens and rob the soil therein ; but here is an 

 instance of a plant one inch high, penetrating into the earth 

 to a distance many times greater than its foliage ventures into 

 the alpine air. And there need be no doubt whatever that 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 their 

 roots. It is true, we occasionally 

 find hollows in flat, hard rock, into 

 which moss and leaves have 

 gathered for ages, and where, in 

 a sort of basin, without an outlet 

 of any kind in the hard rock, 

 plants grow freely; but in excep- 



Mountain flank in process of degradation. r 



tional 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 



