The Population Of The Alps

By Reginald Farrer.

The younger Dumas, long ago, pointed out the extent to which one’s own particular professionalism influences one’s attitude towards the most obvious objects of general interest. And, reading the essays of mountaineering Ramblers – and of all mountaineers in general, – I seem to see that a mountain is, to such aspiring souls, merely a thing to be got up, – or fallen off, as the case may be: an inanimate opponent, seemlily provided with couloirs and  snow-slopes, and other conveniences for the climber. In the personality of the rock-mass one finds but little evidence of interest: the professionalism of the climber tends to blind him to the very existence of the mountain except as an object ascendable or not ascendable. Now naturally one reads accounts of mountaineering for the sake of the ascents, and not for any geological or botanical analysis of the peak in question: yet it would add enormously to the interest and catholicity of his work if the climber found time to note a little what the victim of his efforts was like in itself: and what small brilliant inhabitants he may have remarked in its crevices and gullies as he went.  But, too often, the narrowness of his professionalism prevents him from seeing (or at all events from noticing,) all such details as flowers or insects by the way as are not immediately relevant to the actual details of the climb.

 So here as a counterblast comes in the value of my own professionalism, which is no less virulent than any one else’s.  Perhaps it may come merely as a shock and a heresy to my fellow Ramblers when I make the confession that to me the mountains (apart from their dominant personal and spectacular attraction) exist simply and solely as homes and backgrounds to their population of infinitesimal plants.  A stone-slope wakes my emotion, only as a possible residence for Iberidella rotundifolia: a high granite ridge as a sure seat for Eritrichium nanum. And my special zeal even compels me to find vast joy and stimulation in moraine slopes, – which, from diligent study of mountaineering works, I do not gather to be altogether dear to the heart of the climber.

 Of course my enthusiasm halts, together with my feet, at the precise point where the climber’s best energies are first called upon.  For I will go with him up to the last of the stone-slopes and ridges, to where the final peak begins: but above the first station of Eritrichium nanum I know there is no more need for me to mount: above  that magic point the stark precipices will have no new things for me: though the persevering climber may still be enlivened as he swarms by fresh tufts of Eritrichium or Androsace in crevice or cranny of the cliffs.  If only he would perceive them and record them!  It breaks my professional heart when I read long accounts of climbs in Caucasus or Himâlya without ever a word said of all the rare and priceless plants which must occur to the mountaineer as he goes, and which I would give all the less valued portion of my soul to see for myself. I don’t ask him to know the species accurately or at all: but, Oh dear, if he would only note that here he saw a pink flower, and here he came upon a blue, then I should know, on the slightest specification, that his unworthy eyes had probably been blessed by Primula concinna or  Gentiana Kurroo.  And also, how vastly would the humanity of his own work have been widened: for surely the specialised eye should also be the eye-catholic?  Never may I myself collect a plant without remarking all its mise-en-scène and its circumstances in detail: and the man to whom the climb itself is the protagonist would equally find its dramatic value heightened, if he attempted a complete presentment of all its decorations.

Of Caucasus and Himâlya I can say nothing: which accounts for my envious philippic against unseeing eyes that pass (and feet that very possibly trample, – horrid thought) upon Primula bella and many another princess of the hills, that I myself have vainly longed for years to see and introduce.  But a little of the Alps I do know, from my own peculiar and particular standpoint; and if any mountaineer feels fired by my appeal with any wish to   remark the population of the peaks he climbs, then I can  lighten his labours by assuring him that such duties will  not attack or distract him in the difficult and precipitous  moments of his ascent, while he is shinning up a trackless cliff, or impending helpless over the vast inane: but will  merely diversify his path at duller moments, lending  colour and variety to his preliminary “stodges” up over  stone-slope and moraine.  For the high-alpine flora centres itself at such points: and, of the most gorgeous treasures, most have their radiant point between nine and eleven thousand feet.  Indeed, eleven thousand feet, in   the European Alps, is probably an extreme estimate: true l it is that Ranunculus glacialis climbs (unlike me) to within a few hundred feet from the summit of the Finsteraarhorn, and that Eritrichium mounts probably to 12,000 feet or so on the cliffs of the Bernina range.  But all these occurrences are merely pleasant παρεργα to beguile your climb: the glacial Buttercup, huge pearl-white flower, fading to a rusty rose, has the centre of its distribution in the wet shingles under the naked peaks, and   to whatever height it may climb, I do not expect that those exalted shoots in the final arête of the Finsteraarhorn are much better than dwarf and morbid sprouts,   incapable of blossom.  As for the Blue Moss, the azure ecstasy of Eritrichium nanum begins on the high granite ridges at about 10,000 feet: and, though I have no ocular experience, I would bet that it has no such climbing propensities as the far easier and robuster Glacial Buttercup.  See it you must, though, in all the granite ranges, about the height I quote: I defy any man, not blind from his birth, to pass, unseeing, on those primary arêtes, across the splashing glory of that minified, glorified  Forget-me-not: but where, in a mountaineer’s documents,   will you find the slightest allusion to it?  “Not relevant “you say?  No, perhaps not, in a rigid textual sense, yet how illuminating a touch the allusion would give, and how very brief a space it would consume!  And mountaineering accounts are not usually so fiercely strict on relevance as all that comes to: I have known the most august of climbers diversify their story with little comic prattles by the way.  Surely, then, they could profitably find time to enrich the grey picture of ice and rock with a touch of rose or azure in some cranny as they go?

Oh mountaineer, your way is strange to me: you leave me at the cliff’s foot, gazing up at you with wonder (but not with envy) as, like a fly on a wall, you steadily climb the patently unclimbable.  Therefore of what plants peep out at you from those microscopic chinks which offer you your frail chances of survival I have no experienced tale to tell. Nor, when you get into such straits and points, should I be so inhuman as to expect your notice for anything but the possible handhold or foothold of the next advance.  Indeed, as I say, you are by now too high for floral novelties: the royal alpines preferring to congregate on cliffs and slopes at rather lower altitudes (on those elysian desolations of stone, indeed, where you have left me behind so happily to browse).  Perhaps, if your cliff be of granite, you may still be gratified with the ash-white cushions of Androsace imbricata in the sun baked crannies.  But this is a rare privilege: on the sheer limestone you will far more easily and universally come on the similar, but woolly-green sponge-masses of A. helvetica; Eritrichium you will only find on granite: on granite also most luxuriate the golden suns of Geum reptans and the pearl cups of Ranunculus glacialis, both of these being plants of the highest moraines, which become crevice plants, rather abnormally, as you ascend, in their laudable determination to grow wherever they can, failing the opportunity of growing where they would naturally choose. Occasionally, I fancy, you might also see the flat wide stars of electric blue Campanulacenisia, astray from the moraine shingles which it loves: and on the sternest and “most care-take-ful” (as Sündermann, calls them) rock walls of the Fassa Dolomites you may be privileged with a sight of the rare and lovely Campanula morettiana which never condescends at all upon moraine or shingle, but remains constant to the most impracticable crevices of the high limestone Alps.  In these same Alps the silver-grey sheets of Potentilla nitida climb far, and faithfully abound in their great pink blossoms; but Androsace glacialis, rosy rival of Eritrichium, which rollicks on the highest moraine  shingles as a rule, (abundant in Engadine, Oberland and  Ortler ranges: curiously lacking, so far as my experience  goes, in Dolomites and some parts of Austrian Tyrol), with Geum reptans and Ranunculus glacialis, apparently never, at least in my experience, becomes a crevice plant like its neighbours, though you might possibly come upon it in slopes of fine detritus at great elevations.  As for ridiculous grey-flannel Edelweiss, you will never find this base impostor from Siberia among the real mountain aristocracy of the peaks and high moraines: it belongs to grass-lawns and stone-flats some five hundred feet below the rich shingle-beds under the cliffs; whence it seeds itself down on to all sorts of odd places, even into the river-beds far away below in the valleys; but it never seeds up into the neighbourhood of the real nobility.  There are mats and masses of it, for instance, like daisies in grass, among the scant herbage and beautiful purple Mountain Asters all over the ridgy bed of that extinct glacier which one surmounts to reach the foot of the Schwarzhorn from Rosenlaui.  A little higher up you arrive at a wonderfully rich tract of shingle, filled with true princes of the Alps,  –Ranunculus glacialis, Campanula cenisia, Geum reptans, Cerastium latifolium, Viola cenisia, Ranunculus alpestris, Gentiana brachyphylla, Androsace glacialis.  But there you’ll never see a trace of Edelweiss. The best company into which I have ever seen the Flannel Flower admitted is on that shingly ridge which connects the Drei Zinnen with the Cadinenspitze.  Here, on these flat banks, the Edelweiss grows literally in a lawn: its neighbours are Potentilla nitida in wide sheets, the Gentians clusiana and verna, (it is evident that you are not very high, for, above 7,000 feet Gentiana brachyphylla replaces G. verna; and sometimes G. imbricata, G. bavarica), alpine Pea flowers, the golden Primula bellunensis, Ranunculus Seguieri (the Dolomite version of R. glacialis) and a glorious great form of Ranunculus parnassifolius white as snow. But, of the nobility, only the Potentilla condescends to consort with the Edelweiss: the Buttercups sit selectly alone in an undisputed mud-pan all to their two selves, and the Primula prefers a slope just over the ridge, where Edelweiss does not care to intrude.  The Edelweiss, in fact, is much happier lower down, on ledges and crags where it can germinate among plebeian plants and pretend to be patrician itself, – an assumption in which it is helped by that stupidest of all legends which asserts its rarity and impregnability, so that annually many silly people go falling off cliffs in pursuit of it, – not knowing that it forms the staple herbage on flat stony banks and lawns a little higher up.

All this, you will notice, applies to the ground immediately under the great peaks where mountaineering begins. It is here mainly if not solely, that the observant climber could so profitably enrich his experiences with a little floral colour.  On his way down perhaps, exhilarated by success, and not yet jaded into blindness by miles of subsequent moraine, he might with joy and lightness respond to the cheerful appeal of those brilliant dwellers on the high shingles.  This need not sadden his report of the day, and, in known lands like the Alps, would rather diversify his story.  But, in other ranges, in Caucasus, Norway, Himâlya, how priceless to many a reader, how vivifying to all readers, would be the occurrence here and there of a remark as to some blue or yellow flower noted with pleasure.  At once the arid (to outsiders) description of rock or couloir takes life, one is more than before linked in sympathy with the Climber: and very often, while the unmountaineering, unhorticultural reader is pleased by some such touch, the practical gardener also receives a stimulus either to his knowledge or his imagination.  Often, indeed to his real knowledge: the mountaineer must certainly be a man of widish general education (or he couldn’t have the money to mountaineer) – and nowadays a general education usually enables a man to know at least Primulas, Gentians, Buttercups, Forget-me-nots.  So that the mountaineer’s floral comments might possibly enlighten, as they would certainly enliven, his readers. 

Speaking from my own narrow and basely egoistic standpoint, I crave unutterably for new plants and for new information about plants, – such as the climber in Caucasus or Himâlya must constantly be running the chance of acquiring. And it never seems to come!  In vain is Primula pulchra rosy and brilliant, in vain is Meconopsis aculeata like the sky at dawn: all that the climber sees, and says, is that rocks are grey and ice cold.  Is one asking too much if one suggests that surely ‘he must see a little more than that, (even without any special knowledge), – and that therefore, he ought to find a line of space to say so, even if he cannot, from time to time, pluck up a rosette or a pinch of seed as he goes, wherewith to enrich the gardens of the faithful at home?  And if anyone answers that flower-time is not seed-time, so that what a man notices in bloom he cannot possibly get seed of:  then to that I urge that the curious lover of life will gather seed as he finds it, flower or no flower, on the gambler’s chance that something beautiful will spring up when he gets it home.  Often, indeed, he will have backed a loser, and only a hideous weed will result (for among the high-alpine beauties there are many dull little high-alpine dowdies too): but on the other hand he will now and then know the triumph of all triumphs, when a new and glorious species unfolds, and brings Caucasus or Himâlya into our gardens, and a trebly vivid pang of recollection to the mind of the collector himself.  Who was it who first brought us Primula rosea from the high moraines of Himachâl, to make increasing tufts of glory by our streams: who gathered us Campanula collina from the sunny slopes of Caucasus?  They deserve public statues, both of them, and lettering of fine gold upon the plinths. And it was only a chance pinch of seed that acquired them this merit!  Let all climbers then fare forth in the determination to go and do likewise.

Notes of a few good Alpine rambles, with their plants: (obvious and universal species, such as Arnica, not noted).

 Rosenlaui (Bernese Oberland) To Schwarzhorn. Primula viscosa. Edelweiss in abundance.  Lloydia serotina, Anthericum liliastrum  (rare), Aster alpinus, Androsace helvetica, (on one great boulder), Anemone vernalis, Ranunculus alpestris, Soldenellas; and then on the last shingles under the Schwarzhorn and the Wildgrat, Ranunculus glacialis,Androsace glacialis, Avonicum glaciale, Viola cenisia, Campanula cenisia, Cerastium latifolium, Geum replans, Gentiana brachyphylla, Iberidella rotundifolia. (An extremely brilliant collection, in a small space, of the most typical high-alpines).

Rosenlaui, King’s Peak, (Engelhörner) Aquilegia alpina (on the upper slopes), and on the rocks themselves, Dianthus sylvestris, with Aster and Edelweiss and Androsace helvetica in the crevices.

Piz Ot, (Engadine). Campanula barbata. Senecioabrotanifolius, Dianthus superbus, Gentianaacaulis. On higher slopes, Oxytropis montana, Linaria alpine, Daphne striata; then, Ranunculus parnassifolius, Gentiana verna and G. bavarica, Viola calcarata, Primula gravelens (rare and isolated), P. integrifolia, Dianthus glacialis, Saxifraga oppositifolia. Geum reptans occurs, and Androsace helvetica abounds, about the summit of Piz Padella. Ranunculus glacialis has a station in moraine shingle down between Ot and Padella, together with the Geum and Androsace glacialis: and Eritrichium nanum (absent from the calcareous Padella) begins on a stony shoulder about half-way up the peak, at the same 10,000 feet elevation or so at which you begin finding it on the Languard – as, probably, on all the other granitic masses of the Bernina range.

Schlern Summit (Fassa Dolomites: from Bad Ratzes) Primula longiflora (only one plant seen), Potentilla nitida, Edelweiss, Gentiana angulosa, Androsace vitaliana, Ranunculus rutaefolius. On the steep face descending to the Bärenloch, Valeriana Saliunca, Androsace helvetica, and A. pubescens (?)  Campanula morettiana seems to live higher than I ever got, in the stark face of Rothwand, probably, and the other pinnacles above the Val di Fassa: and I do not believe, in spite of Haussmann, that Eritrichium can ever well have occurred on the summit of the Schlern, which is of Dolomitic limestone. In any case, it is clearly extinct.

Cima Tombea, (S. Tyrol) You drive from Riva di Garda to Storo:  whence the ascent of this high long limestone ridge is made: Cyclamen europaeum, Helleborus niger, Primula auricula,P. spectabilis (?), Lilium bulbiferum,  Carex baldensis(?), Genista radianta,Phyteuma comosum (in perfectly unnegotiable crannies); then, on the summits and ridges of Tombea itself, Saxifraga arachnoidia and S. tombeanensis (both, probably, extirpated by collectors), Sax. raesia, Daphne striata, Linum alpinum, Viola heterophylla, Silene Elizabethae,Ranunculus crenatus. Primula spectabilis, and Daphne rupestris (the sole raison d’etre of the Cima Tombea).

Horron, (Maritime Alps, from St. Martin Vésubie). Dianthus serotinus (?),Hypericum raris, Campanula macrophiza (throughout the region), Atragene alpina, Saxifraga hypnoeides, Primula marginata, P. latifolia, P. Auricula, Dianthus neglectus, Viola zoysi, Saxifraga lantoscana, S.neicoon , and Saxifraga florulenta (occurs only in this rich district, and only in it few localities high up, on Northern rock  faces). In sunny crevices Violanummulariaefolia may be found, while, among other rarities, both Eritrichium nanum and Androsace glacalis occur certainly on the Halloure, if not on the Boreon. This district is also the radiant point of Saxifraga rochlearis and of the true S. lingulata