[1] The name “Grass-of-Parnassus” often occasions wonder; for the plant, a member of the St. John’s Wort tribe, shows no affinity to grass. Anne Pratt, in her celebrated book on English Wild-flowers, says the name possibly arises from the fact that the plant “is as common as the very grass itself on Mount Parnassus.”
Messieurs les étrangers (how good a name!) are now arriving by the hundred. Flora’s Feast in this region may be said to be over, and the table is all but cleared. For full two months have we been revelling in a luxury of colour which no other two months make any but an indifferent attempt to approach; and it is when these two months have run their unique, delightful course that the vast majority of our fellows arrive. How strangely perverse a state of things is this! How curiously sunken in the groove of custom!
PARADISIA LILIASTRUM, the Paradise or St. Bruno’s Lily.
The fields are bald, the slopes are shorn or ragged, and the grass that is left standing is looking for the most part very “seedy.” The golden-flowered, pink-flowered, and white-flowered Sedums are blossoming upon the field-rocks; the Willow-Herb is lighting up the rough and stony places with its rosy-red spikes; the Bilberry’s fruit is turning a dusty blue and its foliage here and there is showing promise of a fiery autumn; the Rhododendron is developing on its thick leaves the brilliant red excrescences which, like the hairy, red excrescences on our common Dog Rose, are said to be so efficacious in cases of rheumatism; the dainty, black-bordered Damon “Blue” butterfly flits from the Heather to stray blooms of Arnica and Astrantia, and many a brown Erebia is hampered and tired out by a horde of red parasites beneath its wings. Summer, in fact, is leaning obviously towards autumn, and we can expect nothing more of note from these meadows, except a lovely wealth of magenta-pink Colchicum or “Autumn Crocus” in August and September.
When visitors, arriving at this late stage in Flora’s fortunes, see my coloured transcripts of the fields in May and June, they think that I, like any prejudiced enthusiast, have falsified my evidence. They find the pictures ben trovato, and they say: “How beautiful! but of course you have used an artist’s licence?” They look at the shaven or dingy fields, then again at my paintings, and they tell me plainly they think they can prove an alibi for the flowers in spring, or, at any rate, for a greater part of those I have depicted. And I—I can only assure them their case has “no leg to stand upon.” I can only insist that if they knew of my despair when seated with my picture among the flowers in spring—my despair of ever being able to give more than an inkling of the glorious riot that surrounded me—they would suspect the truth; and that if next year they came here and witnessed for themselves, then, when again they looked upon my pictures, they would curl the lip and speak of insufficiency.
I am aware that it is, of course, not possible for many of the late-coming visitors to leave the home shores earlier in the year: business is business, schooling is schooling, fixed holidays are fixed holidays. But without doubt there are many who could be more timely, if they chose—many who in June are crowding at Montreux, or Geneva, or Lucerne, thinking it too early for the mountains. For there are many who are persuaded that spring is a dangerous period in the Alps. They will tell you in all seriousness, as they have told me, that it is in spring in the Alps that the microbes re-awaken after their winter’s sleep, and that, therefore, it is better to be in the towns; in the towns, mark you, where the microbes, more monstrous and numerous, rarely if ever, slumber—or, if they do so, it is with one eye open!
Then there are those who, because they know nothing about flowers, are convinced that the Alps for them would be a place of ennui in the spring when high excursions are not yet possible. But what a mistake it is to imagine we must be botanists or gardeners in order to feel a full joy in these fields! No particular knowledge is required to appreciate them; there is no peremptory need to know by name a Geranium from an Orchid, a Pansy from a Cauliflower. Indeed, I am not at all sure but that the “plain man” or woman does not really enjoy them more than does the plant specialist. For joy comes mostly fuller with the broader moments of life, and analysis is apt to injure the soul-stirring harmony of things. And as the merely emotional value of these fields is immense, their appeal is quite as general as it is particular, perhaps even more so; for the emotional qualities of anything are more acceptable to the man-in-the-street than are its precise and reasoned quantities. And, just as there are far fewer musicians within the ranks of executants than outside, so there are more flower-lovers and lovers of floral beauty outside the ranks of botany and gardening than there are within. Thus amid these fields the plain, expansive man or woman need be in no fear of ennui. Ennui!—why, even when the visitors do come and the flowers have seen their best, there is no ennui! Then how much more inspiring must it be when the fields are in their hey-day, not their hay-day!