It seems strange we should be so strictly narrow in our outlook, surrounded as we are by so much clearly demonstrated resourcefulness; it seems strange that all day long our dogmatic finger should point here, then there, and the presumptuous cry go up, “This is the only right and proper way!” It seems strange: for it is thus a person is a savage in our eyes if, instead of wearing ornaments in his ears, he wears them in his nose and lips. To be sure, we are improving in this respect, for at one time we readily burnt people who had another way of doing things. But there is still vast room for progress. And, surely, it is no fond trick of the imagination to believe that an appreciable amount of this room will gradually be appropriated to progress made through Nature Study. For Nature is too far-sighted to be dogmatic, too capable to be academic; she leaves an illimitable margin for what is right, incidentally giving a complete exposition of the truth of our much employed, but much neglected adage, “All roads lead to Rome.”
Now, in these two Swiss Rhododendrons there is excellent occasion for noting two very different means of offering highly effective resistance to a common foe. The foe is drought—the drought of the hot, ungenerous, porous moraine, and of the rapid, rocky, sun-baked, wind-swept slope. Mountain circumstance, such as is affected for the most part by these Rhododendrons, is the outcome of comparatively recent disturbance; soil is in the forming, and what there is of it but thinly coats a tumbled bed of crevassed rocks and boulders. Casual observation may lead visitors to suppose the Swiss Alpine climate to be by no means devoid of moisture and to be liable at all seasons to its fair share of damp, all-enveloping cloud and fog, and to storms of snow and rain. And casual observation will be right. But no section of the globe’s face is more thoroughly and more promptly drained than that of the Alps, and a “deluge” of rain is like so much water on a duck’s back. Hence, an incomparable system of drainage is one of the prime disabilities against which Alpine vegetation has to contend. And the Rhododendrons meet this disability in two ways—ferrugineum with hard leaves, varnished above, and felted and resinous beneath; hirsutum with softer, pliant leaves fringed by hairs. Thus do both fence ably the evil of too rapid evaporation; thus do both, by their diverse methods, give to the student
“The subtle hintings of a perfect whole.”
GENTIANA VERNA, the type-plant, and some of its forms.
CHAPTER IX
THE JULY FIELDS