Comme la brume au sol et la fumée au toit.
Viens au jardin!”
Rosemonde Gérard, Les Jardins.
CHAPTER XI
ALPINE FIELDS FOR ENGLAND
“En multipliant la beauté, en donnant au monde des humbles le sens de la sincère beauté, vous lui aurez fait la plus exquise et peut-être la plus utile des charités.”—Pierre Vignot.
The title of this chapter will come as a shock to some, and they will think it an insult to, and an outrage upon, Nature’s existing efforts for English meadows. In my previous volume, “Alpine Flowers and Gardens,” I ventured some mild wonder “that more attempts are not made in England to create Alpine pastures,” and I added: “Alpine rockworks we have in hundreds, but a stretch of meadow-land sown or planted with Alpine field-flowers seems as yet to be but rarely attempted.” And of this mild wonder some of my critics fell foul, and I was told that I seemed “to forget the peculiar beauty of English pasture as it is, with its buttercups, cowslips, and orchis, daisies and red sorrel.” But let me reassure these nervous champions of what is “made in England.” I will be the last to slight or traduce the exquisite restraint of our typical home-fields, or to despise the spirit that can appreciate their charm and place it higher than the charm of alien fields. The inhabitants of a country are intimately affected by the country’s fields, and an Englishman is far more a product of his meadows than even he would suppose. His sturdy advocacy of a floral sufficiency which stops at Dandelions and Buttercups is part proof of this. Reciprocity in Nature is a very subtle and far-reaching law, and man owes much of his temperament and habit of mind to the landscape and its constituent parts. In this way, undoubtedly, the Englishman is largely indebted to the comparative taciturnity of his fields. Far be from me, then, to under-rate their value and their charm.
And yet, may I not think that this value and charm can perhaps be augmented? We love and revel in our native meadows as they are—their Buttercups, their Dandelions, their Daisies, and their Grasses; how much greater would not the love and revel be if here and there a generous measure of Swiss mountain-wealth were added? Such measure would be no violent innovation; it would be a natural amplification of the hereditary trend of our instinct for the beautiful. Swiss mountain-fields are not like Japanese gardens: our nature responds to them without affectation, for in them our mind