THE RHODODENDRON
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
The Rhododendron is commonly spoken and written of as the Alpine Rose; but it is a member of the Heath family, and not of that family which fable says was created by Bacchus. This is a ready instance of where popular nomenclature, without discipline, leads to confusion; for there is an Alpine Rose (Rosa alpina), a very lovely rich magenta-coloured Eglantine often growing cheek-by-jowl with the pseudo Alpenrose of the Germans. It is quite possible that the word “Rose” really springs—as in Monte Rosa—from roisa or roësa, meaning “glacier” in the ancient patois of the valley of Aosta, and I have several times seen this more than suggested by authorities in etymology. The fact remains, however, that the Rhododendron has become a rose and has thus obscured to some extent the repute and worth of the real Alpine Rose. In French, the Rhododendron, though it is often known as Rose des Alpes, is sometimes spoken of as Rue des Alpes and Rosage.
The Rhododendron is the Swiss national flower. Nor am I sure but that this honour is not borne almost entirely by R. ferrugineum. This is far more widespread than is hirsutum, being far less difficult in its likes and dislikes. For example, notwithstanding that hirsutum loves limestone, it shuns the Jura Mountains, whereas ferrugineum is common in the Jura, though usually it is shy of lime. And if the honours really are undivided, they seem to be won by superior aptness, and the laurel-wreath rests, I think, upon the more appropriate brow. For, of the two, ferrugineum best typifies the Swiss national character—masculine sturdiness, common-sensed sanity, void of fine fastidiousness. The whole habit of ferrugineum is more robust, more rigid, more resistant. It seeks small clemency; it has, so to speak, its teeth set, prepared to front the rudest buffets of Alpine circumstance without a prayer for pity, and to come up smiling in spite of all. Although, of course, hirsutum has its own good way of overcoming severe conditions, it has a greater delicacy of bearing and does not impress one as being possessed of its cousin’s rugged nature.
Eugène Rambert, the Swiss poet-alpinist, speaks of the Rhododendron as being “la plante alpine par excellence” and in doing so he probably uses the word “Alpine” in the same sense in which we ourselves are here using it, or else perhaps he refers to the plant as, for the most part, it is resident in Switzerland. For on the Italian face of the Alps the Rhododendron descends, as around Lugano, to the plains. Mr. Stuart Thompson, who has made a special study of altitude in connection with the mountain flora, says in his “Alpine Plants of Europe” that R. ferrugineum “ascends to 8,800 feet in Valais, to at least 8,200 feet in the Maritime Alps, and descends into the plain in Tessin by Lago Maggiore (with R. hirsutum), and by Lake Wallenstadt, and it is occasionally found as a glacier relic in turbaries in the woods of the Swiss plateau.”
Mr. Thompson, by mentioning the fact of the remains of Rhododendron being found in peat deposits on the plains, gives us a glimpse of this plant slowly retreating up the mountains with the glaciers. And yet, on the south side of the Alps, it is still to be found upon the plains! This is one of the mysteries of Alpine plant-life, and one for which I have seen no satisfactory theory. Gentiana verna shows us, I believe, the same seeming inconsistency, descending to the sea-coast in Ireland, yet rarely, if ever, found below 1,300 feet in Switzerland.
Like the English Dog Rose—and this, perhaps, is its greatest likeness to a Rose—the Rhododendron develops galls (Oak-apples or Robin’s Pincushions, as they are called in England) upon its leaves. Some of these are produced by insects and some by a fungus (Exobasidium rhododendri), the latter gall being yellow, and turning pink or rose on the sunny side. The leaves and flowers are used in infusion for rheumatism; also as an ingredient of Swiss tea. This shrub, too, is the food-plant of one of the handsomest of Alpine butterflies, Colias Palæno, a Clouded-Yellow—anything but clouded, though it lives where clouds are born, for with its clear citron wings boldly bordered with jet-black and rimmed with tender rose, it is a bright, true child of high altitudes.
Nor should the Rhododendron be forgotten as a subject for our gardens. When raised from layers or from seed, it takes quite kindly to our climate. Indeed, the plants at “Floraire,” M. Henry Correvon’s charming garden near Geneva, come from England—a fact that will sound much in line with that of living at Brighton and receiving one’s fish from London! This anomaly, in the case of the Rhododendron, is due to the great difficulty of acclimatising the plant to the Swiss plains. When, however, it has once been acclimatised in England it will transplant to Switzerland with the greatest success. I cannot remember ever to have seen in Switzerland a successfully transplanted native plant of Rhododendron, even though, as is frequently the case around mountain hotels, it has been a question of moving it only some few yards from where it was growing wild. These wild plants have a strong objection to being tamed. But in England’s humid climate it is quite easy to cultivate, and if fields are to be added to our rockworks the Rhododendron must have a place in them—a place around the solitary rocks, a place with the Daphne and the shrubby Honeysuckles.
With what fecundity of resource Nature marshals her forces; with what amazing ingenuity she passes to her goal! As if to show her wayward child how academic strictness in one straight line is not the road to greatest success, she takes a thousand ways to reach one and the same end, causing extremes and opposites in method to give a common high result. And this she does on every hand, and in all of her domains. In the world with which we are now dealing—the plant-world—she is particularly rich in ways and means. See how, for example, some flowers need the wind to assist them to propagate their kind, and note the many ways such flowers have of courting the wind’s assistance; see how others need the bees and flies to busy themselves about them, and note the many ways such have of attracting the attentions of bees and flies; see how some will call in a beetle to eat his way to their hearts, whilst others will just hob-nob together, independent of any intermediary. See, again, how some plants bury their roots in the earth for sustenance, whilst others, with like object, will bury them in the air; see, too, how some will climb by the help of their thorns, whilst others will do so by the aid of tendrils, or of rootlets, or of adhering fingers. An admirably efficient way of achieving a purpose does not preclude the possibility of there being a score or more other and equally efficient ways of achieving the same purpose. One species of Orange-tree may carry its seed in the core of its fruit, whilst another may carry it in a special exterior annexe; or one species of Mangrove-tree may breathe by means of its leaves, whilst another may do so by means of tube-like organs thrown up through the soft mud.
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