PART I.] NOTES OF A JOURNEY IN THE ALPS 125 



the opposite side of the valley single leaves of it were nearly 

 3 inches across and 5 inches long. This will help to show 

 the fallacy of supposing that, because a plant is found in almost 

 inaccessible places and hard chinks of cold alpine rock, we must 

 attempt the nearly impossible task of imitating such condi- 

 tions, or give up the culture of such an interesting class of plants. 

 The cliffs here rise in some parts like a vast wall to a height 

 of 8000 feet stupendous and beautiful towers of rock and sun- 

 lit snow, perfectly lifeless, but reverberating now and then with 

 tumbling avalanches of the recently fallen snow. Above the 

 village of Macugnaga, as in many other parts of the Alps, some 

 of the Larchwoods are beautiful from the evidences of the 

 struggle for life. Once the breath of summer has passed over 

 the earth, the dwarf herbage is all freshness and life the 

 smallness and feebleness of the minute vegetation preventing us 

 from seeing the stamp of the destroyer. The winter snow 

 weighs down the little stems, and then when in spring their 

 successors come up in crowds, the earth is covered with a 

 carpet, as if winter would never come again. But not so with 

 the trees. Many lay prostrate, dead, barked, and bleached 

 nearly white among the flowers that crowded up around them. 

 Others were in the same condition, but leaning half erect amidst 

 their green companions : others were dashed bodily over the 

 faces of cliffs : others had their heads and trunks swept over 

 the cliffs by the fierce mountain storms, but holding on by their 

 roots, and, in the most contorted shapes, endeavoured to lift their 

 living tops above the rocky scarp from which in their pride of 

 youth they had been cast. I never in any wood saw anything 

 so wildly and grimly beautiful as this. 



WOOD PLANTS. 



We next resolved to descend into the plains of Lombardy, 

 cross the lakes of North Italy, go as far as Lecco on the Lake of 

 Como, ascend Monte Campione, and find Silene Elisabethce, a 

 plant as rare as beautiful, and any good plants which that 

 region might afford. The long and ever-varying Val Anzasca, 



