It is a fine sport, this flower-gazing; not only because all the plants are beautiful and many of them rare, but because it demands a certain skill to balance oneself on a steep declivity, while looking upward, through binoculars, at some attractive clump of purple saxifrage, or moss-campion, or thrift, or rose-root, or globe-flower, as the case may be.[19] To the veteran rambler especially, this flower-cult is congenial; for it supplies--I will not say an excuse for not going to the top, but a less severe and exacting diversion, which still takes him into the inmost solitudes of the mountain, and keeps him in unfailing touch with its character and genius.
[Footnote 19: In Parkinson's _Theatrum Botanicum_ (1640) it is remarked of rose-root that it grows "oftentimes in the ruggiest places, and most dangerous of them, scarce accessible, and so steepe that they may soon tumble downe that doe not very warily looke to their footing."]
I have spoken of Snowdonia in the spring; let us view it now in the fulness of June or July, when its flora is at its richest. It is not till you have climbed to a height of about two thousand feet that the true joys of the mountains begin. At first, perhaps, as you follow the course of the stream you will see nothing more than a bunch of white scurvy-grass or a spray of golden-rod; but when you reach the region where the thin cascade comes sliding down over the moist rocks, and the topmost cliffs seem to impend, then you will have your reward, for you have entered into the kingdom of the Alpines.
Suppose, for example, that you stand at the foot of the narrow ridge of Crib-y-Ddysgl, a great precipice which overhangs the upper chambers of Cwm Glas on the northern side of Snowdon, with an escarpment formed of huge slabs of rock intersected by wet gullies, narrow niches, and transverse terraces of grass. Looking up, to where the Crib towers above, you will see a goodly array of plants. Thrift is there, in large clumps as handsome as on any sea-cliffs; rose-root, the big mountain-stonecrop; cushions of moss-campion, which bears the local name of "Snowdon pink"; lady's-mantle, intermixed with the reddening leaves of mountain-sorrel; Welsh poppy, not so common a flower in Wales as its name would suggest; and at least three kinds of beautiful white blossoms--the starry saxifrage, the mossy saxifrage, and the shapely little sandwort (_arenaria verna_), as fair as the saxifrages themselves, and what higher praise could be given? The flower-lover can scarcely hope for greater delight than that which the starry saxifrage will yield him. It has been well said that "one who has not seen it growing, say, in some rift of the rock exposed by the wearing of the mountain torrent, cannot imagine how lovely it is, or how fitly it is named. White and starry, and saxifrage--how charming must that which has three such names be!"[20]