Fanny Elizabeth Sidebottom,
A Spiritual Sense.
According to authority, there are about 186 species of Rhododendron in the world. The greatest number of varieties inhabit India and China, and they are important plants in the Caucasus, where often—as with Rhododendron ponticum—they cover the entire side of a mountain. In Switzerland there are but two varieties, R. ferrugineum and R. hirsutum, and they are to the Swiss Alps what the Heather is to the Scottish mountains (with, however, this difference—the Alps have also the Heather). They clothe the open mountain-side with a deep evergreen growth, invading the lichen-scored rocks and even the pine-forests, and robing themselves, from mid-June to mid-July, in such rosy-red attire as fascinates even the accustomed peasant, causing him almost as much delight as they cause the stranger. Indeed, their flowering is a masterpiece of Nature’s art, and few things are more fitting the sun’s ascendency and the advent of cowbells upon the pastures. Wherever on the fields there is a rock, there shines the rosy shrub against the grey mass, and the steep slopes glint and glow as they will do in the autumn when the Bilberry and other groundlings catch afire. I have met visitors in disappointment at the smallness of the blossoms, and inquiring where the large-flowered forms of our gardens might be found. Certainly, these plants are not those of the Himalaya, but I warrant they can boast a glory all their own—one inspired by its particular circumstance and surroundings, and vying in that respect with the glory of the kinsfolk of India or of the Azalea in Afghanistan. Abundance rather than size is the keynote of this present splendour; and the abundance is amazing, giving us a mass of colour which larger individual flowers could scarcely rival.
Wet or fine the glow abides, but in fine weather its rich brilliance is certainly of summer’s best and goes far to reconcile us to the lost glories of the Vernal Gentian. There can be few more satisfying recollections of early summer days than when, waist-deep amid the Rhododendrons overgrowing some ancient rock-fall, one gazed across a rosy expanse, sparingly broken by grey boulder and blasted pine and falling away towards the snout of some sea-green glacier backed by snow-draped crags and aiguilles, with, in the foreground, on occasional turfy intervals, groups of orange Arnica and of Gymnadenia albida, the Small Butterfly Orchids, close consort of the Rhododendron, whilst the Swallow-tail and Alpine Clouded-Yellow butterflies flirted with the blossoms and chased each other in the thin, clear air and joy-inspiring sunlight. “The Alpine Rhododendron ... once gave me,” Mr. George Yeld tells us in his chapter contributed to the Rev. W. A. B. Coolidge’s “The Alps in Nature and in History,” “one of the most effective sights in the flower-world that I can recall. I came upon it in a late season—acres of Rhododendron ferrugineum, in a forest where the trees grew at some distance apart. The brightness of the colour—a rich red—the extent of the flower show, the setting of pines, and the background of stately ramparts of rock, with an occasional waterfall, made the scene unique; and the memory of it is proportionately vivid.” Scarce can such experience need enlargement along the line of pleasure, and surely no well-regulated mind will wander in search of larger-flowered varieties! Such scenes are satisfaction itself—except that they play upon some secret human chord, awaken “an obscure and mystic sense” and waft inquisitive mentality
“to the glow
Beyond yon filmy barrier without name
That no eye pierceth!”
PRIMULA FARINOSA, GENTIANA VERNA, Micheli’s Daisy, BARTSIA ALPINA, POLYGALA ALPINA, and the two Pinguiculas or Butterworts, painted directly in the fields at the end of May.