CHAPTER VI 

 GLACIER PARK WILD FLOWERS 



THE least impressionable person alive cannot go to 

 the Rocky Mountains without giving enthusiastic at- 

 tention to the wild flowers. This is only in part due to 

 the individual beauty of those flowers. In the East we 

 have many as beautiful, some more beautiful, and still 

 more we share with the West. But it is seldom that our 

 flowers grow in such masses and profusion, with so 

 many kinds and colours blended on one small square of 

 ground, and, above all, it is seldom that our flowers have 

 the field so much to themselves, sharing it only with a 

 little sparse grass, the scattered groups of limber pine 

 or firs, and the ice-water brooks from the snowfields. 

 The Rocky Mountain wild flowers often display their 

 colours, indeed, against a backing of pure snow, or grow 

 underneath pink and red and purple precipices, and 

 beside lakes of iceberg green. They are a foreground of 

 delicate beauty for a picture of stupendous impact. No 

 other flowers have such a setting, are so intimately 

 associated with landscape gardening in the grand style, 

 the style of Shakespeare and of Milton. 



When I went into Glacier Park, I bought a book 



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