ALPINE PLANTS IN THEIR NATIVE MOUNTAINS. 



167 



bavarica, is more adaptable than a plant like Pyrola uniflora, which I have 

 seen growing freely on the bank of a trench in a Swiss pasture only about 

 6,000 feet above the sea, so freely that if I had not happened to know 

 something of its habits, I might have been tempted by its beauty to carry 

 it home to a certain, if lingering, death in my rock garden. But, if one 

 is in search of deceptive plants, one need not take a rare one like the 

 Pyrola. There is the little Soldanella alpina, one of the commonest 

 plants of the Alps. It grows everywhere, and you would think that it 

 would be as easy to cultivate as Campanula pumila. Yet everyone knows 

 that it is difficult to flower ; and for this reason, that it first starts into 

 growth with the snows melting all round it, and it needs the moisture 

 produced by these to make it form its buds. If it begins to form them 

 in the east winds of an English March they are likely to wither up 

 before they can come out, and the only way to succeed with Soldanellas, 

 at least in a dry Surrey garden, is to surround them in spring with moss 

 that must be kept damp until the flowering time is over. Or take, again, the 

 case of Gentiana vema, a plant even commoner, which grows in pastures, 

 in the fissures of rocks, and even in the glades of pinewoods. You might 

 suppose from its abundance in all positions that it would grow anyhow in 

 your rock garden. In which case your plants would probably be dead within 

 a couple of months of planting. For Gentiana vema is not an easy plant 

 to grow, at least in a hot Surrey garden, for two very good reasons. The 

 first is that, like Pyrola uniflora, it dislikes disturbance and is slow to 

 make new roots when once it has been disturbed. Where it grows wild, it 

 is, of course, never disturbed from the time when the seeds first germinate. 

 But since it is difficult to raise from seed, most gardeners plant it in 

 early spring ; and then, being thus weakened by disturbance, it has to 

 endure other conditions quite different from those which make it thrive 

 in Switzerland. There when first it starts into growth and all during 

 the flowering time it gets continued moisture from melting snows. In 

 England it may experience droughts and east winds all through March and 

 April ; the consequence is that it makes no growth before the hot weather 

 and dies in the first heat of June. In Switzerland one often finds it 

 growing where it must be bone dry in late summer. But then it has got 

 vigour enough in the earlier part of the year to endure any amount of 

 later drought. In England it will not endure any drought until it is 

 well established, which will often take a couple of years ; and even then 

 it will not make the same growth in our springs as among the melting 

 snows of its native country. Thus in England it must be always pro- 

 tected against drought, and it is fatal to treat it as an ordinary rock plant. 

 It needs a flat place low down in the rock garden that will catch all the 

 rain that falls, and it needs watering in any hot dry weather. 



There are many other plants, such as the rock Primulas, Anemone 

 alpina and Anemone sulphurea and the Alpenroses, which one finds 

 growing in very dry places, but which will not endure the same drought in 

 England. On a slope above Fionnay I walked for over an hour among 

 Anemone sulphurea growing as thick as buttercups, and with flowers larger 

 than the largest of Anemone japonica. It was mixed at first with 

 Myosotis alpestris and higher up with Gentiana vema and Gentiana 

 acaulis. Already where the Anemones were finest and most abundant the 



