INTRODUCTION. 



culture, they were conquered by one difficulty — that of grow- 

 itig alpine plants. Any reader of this book can prove for 

 himself that these ideas are as unfounded as they are 

 general, and that intelligent cultivation will prove as success- 

 ful with the plants of the coldest and most elevated regions 

 as it has already proved with the choicest plants of steaming 

 tropical forests. So far from its being true that they cannot 

 be cultivated, I have no ■hesitation in saying that there is 

 no alpine flower that ever cheered the traveller's eye with 

 its brilliancy that cannot be successfully grown in these 

 islands. 



What are alpine plants ? The word alpine is here "used 

 in an arbitrary sense to define the vegetation that grows 

 naturally on the most elevated regions of the earth — on all 

 very high mountain-chains, whether they spring from hot 

 tropical plains or green northern pastures. Above the cul- 

 tivated land these flowers begin to occur on the fringes of 

 the stately woods ; they are seen in multitudes in the vast 

 and delightful, pastures with which many great mountain- 

 chains are robed, enamelling their soft verdure with innu- 

 merable dyes ; and where neither grass nor loose herbage 

 can exist — where feeble world-heat and world-force are 

 quenched and discomfited on their own ground by mightier 

 powers ; where mountains are crumbled into ghastly slopes 

 of shattered rock by contending throbbings of heat and cold, 

 and where the very water becomes hard and relentless as 

 stone, yet bears and moves thousands of tons of rock as 

 easily as the Gulf Stream carries a seed — even there thev 

 modestly, but brilliantly and bravely, spring from Nature's 

 ruined battle-ground, as if the mother of earth-life had sent 

 up her sweetest and loveliest children to plead with the fell 

 Spirits of destruction. 



