“... the fair earth’s fond expression
Of tenderness for heaven above ...”!
To each do we accord, as Mr. Augustine Birrell would say, “a mass of greedy utterances”; to each do we lose our hearts; but only to one do we lose our heads. And that one is the Edelweiss: the plant of leaves which ape a flower; the plant whose flower is as inconspicuous as that of our common Sun Spurge; the plant that would have us forget its abundance on many a pasture, and think of it only as clinging perilously to high-flung cliffs where browse the chamois and where nest the choughs.
The Gentian Family as a whole is possessed of very striking individuality, and for the most part its members arrest more than usual attention. Its name is said to be derived from Gentius, King of Illyria, who is reputed to have first made known its medicinial properties—tonic, emetic, and narcotic. Although it ranges from Behring’s Straits to the Equator and on to the Antipodes, its residence is mainly northern. In New Zealand its chief colour is red; in Europe blue; and of all its blue European representatives none can eclipse perennial verna’s radiant star.
The Vernal Gentian is no stranger to England, though, as an indigenous plant, it is a stranger to most Englishmen. It is still to be found on wet limestone rocks in Northern England (Teesdale) and also in the north-west of Ireland. Like Gentiana nivalis of the small band of Alpine annuals and tiniest of the blue-starred Gentians, it lingers in the British Isles, a rare, pathetic remnant of past salubrity of climate and condition; and to its homes in England and Ireland, rather than in Switzerland, we should perhaps go to study how to grow it in our gardens more successfully than we do at present. But it is to the Alps that we must turn to find it revelling wealthily in a setting for which it is pre-eminently suited; it is there that its
“... living flowers
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet.”
For, in the Alps, it is an abundant denizen of the pastures in general: both the grazing pastures or “Alps,” and “the artificial modifications of the pastures,” as Mr. Newell Arber calls the meadows.