Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/123

Rh nook, every jutting point or wee promontory of shelter. And as the mountain plants have been accustomed for ages to the strenuous conditions of such cold and wind-swept situations, they have ended, of course, by adapting themselves to that station in life to which it has pleased the powers that be to call them. They grow quite naturally low and stumpy and rosette-shaped; they are compact of form and very hard of fiber; they present no surface of resistance to the wind in any way; rounded and boss-like, they seldom rise above the level of the rocks and stones whose interstices they occupy. It is this combination of characters that makes mountain plants such favorites with florists; for they possess of themselves that close-grown habit and that rich profusion of clustered flowers which it is the grand object of the gardener by artificial selection to produce and encourage.

When one talks of "the limit of trees" on a mountain-side, however, it must be remembered that the phrase is used in a strictly human or Pickwickian sense, and that it is only the size, not the type, of the vegetation that is really in question. For trees exist even on the highest hill-tops; only they have accommodated themselves to the exigencies of the situation. Smaller and ever smaller species have been developed by natural selection to suit the peculiarities of these inclement spots. Take, for example, the willow and poplar group. Nobody would deny that a weeping willow by an English river, or a Lombardy poplar in an Italian avenue, was as much of a true tree as an oak or a chestnut. But as one mounts toward the bare and wind-swept mountain heights one finds that the willows begin to grow downward gradually. The "netted willow" of the Alps and Pyrenees, which shelters itself under the lee of little jutting rocks, attains a height of only a few inches; while the "herbaceous willow," common on all very high mountains in western Europe, is a tiny, creeping weed, which nobody would ever take for a forest tree by origin at all, unless he happened to see it in the catkin-bearing stage, when its true nature and history would become at once apparent to him.

Yet this little herb-like willow, one of the most northerly and hardy of European plants, is a true tree at heart none the less for all that. Soft and succulent as it looks in branch and leaf, you may yet count on it sometimes as many rings of annual growth as on a lordly Scotch fir tree. But where? Why, underground. For see how cunning it is, this little stunted descendant of proud forest lords: hard-pressed by Nature, it has learned to make the best of its difficult and precarious position. It has a woody trunk at core, like all other trees; but this trunk never appears above the level of the soil: it creeps and roots underground in tortuous zigzags between the crags and bowlders that lie strewn through