Part I. A LITTLE TOUR IN THE ALPS. 103 



and yet so small that a shilling would cover the entire plant. 

 In lower spots on the opposite side of the valley single leaves 

 of it were nearly three inches across and five 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 conditions, or give up the culture of such 

 an interesting class of plants. 



The views here are magnificent, especially that from above 

 the level of the glacier at the upper end ; and looking down the 

 valley and along the great ranges which seem to border it, 

 indeed hardly anything can be finer than the Monte Rosa group 

 at the head of the valley. The cliffs rise in some parts like a 

 vast wall to a height of 8000 feet — awfully beautiful towers of 

 rock and sunlit snow, perfectly lifeless, but reverberating now 

 and then with small tumbling avalanches of the recently fallen 

 snow. 



Above the village of Macugnaga, as in many other parts of the 

 Alps, some of the Larch-woods 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 fresh 

 green companions : others were dashed bodily over the faces of 

 cliffs : others had their heads and bodies swept over the cliffs by 

 the fierce mountain storms, but holding on by their roots, and 

 assuming the quaintest contortions, 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. It suggested 

 that it would be an improvement to allow something analogous 

 to take place in woods planted for ornament only, or in 

 such parts of woods as form portions or fringes of our pleasure- 

 grounds. In ornamental gardening we often lose by remov- 

 ing all traces of death, as Dr. Hooker has shown us by allowing 



