Sometimes a noisy stream
goes brawling down through them, and again, scarcely a drop of water is
in sight. They owe their existence, however, to streams, whether visible
or invisible, the wildest specimens being found where some perennial
fountain, as a glacier or snowbank or moraine spring sends down its
waters across a rough sheet of soil in a dissipated web of feeble,
oozing rivulets. These conditions give rise to a meadowy vegetation,
whose extending roots still more obstruct the free flow of the waters,
and tend to dissipate them out over a yet wider area. Thus the moraine
soil and the necessary moisture requisite for the better class of meadow
plants are at times combined about as perfectly as if smoothly outspread
on a level surface. Where the soil happens to be composed of the finer
qualities of glacial detritus and the water is not in excess, the
nearest approach is made by the vegetation to that of the lake-meadow.
But where, as is more commonly the case, the soil is coarse and
bouldery, the vegetation is correspondingly rank. Tall, wide-leaved
grasses take their places along the sides, and rushes and nodding
carices in the wetter portions, mingled with the most beautiful and
imposing flowers,--orange lilies and larkspurs seven or eight feet high,
lupines, senecios, aliums, painted-cups, many species of mimulus and
pentstemon, the ample boat-leaved _veratrum alba_, and the
magnificent alpine columbine, with spurs an inch and a half long.
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