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To study the plant kingdom of the Alpine meadows you needn't go to Alps. You must only fly in the airport of "Mineralnie vody (The Watering-place") and after two ours pass you will stay on the mountain in Caucasus and watch yourself all the profusive variety of the flowers in the one of the most interesting biological and climatic zone.
Last summer we fixed a camp near the border of snows under the pass South Kukurtkliu. We spent some days here, learning native flora. It's a very picturesque place. The insensate rocks and snows drop here into the thrifty Alpine meadows. You'll meet here the green fields of different flowers, little
mountain brooks, flowing from springs and lakes. It looks like the huge size Alpine rock-garden.
A lot of plants here are well-known to you: the different species of houseleek, wall-cress, crassula, wide-known Alpine aster, bellflower, cat's foot. However the combination among them, their combination with the stones, covered by lichens, with the crystal streams and white snows is so harmonious, that all the tryings of the gardeners to create something like this in the rock-gardens may cause the pity only.
But how long can you stay in the mountains? This is why the willing to take some plants here and bring them to our comfortable commonness of our gardens we have near Moscow. They will remind us of the cristall air, the bottomless blue sky, the highland sun and the snow-white peaks.
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There are a lot of plants suitable for the purpose, but our heavy rucksacks make us to choose the best samples only.
First of all - the gentians. We reckon 8 of their species. The most beautiful are the rosette ones: the spring gentian (Gentiana verna) of unusual azure and the Jamil's gentian. The bush forms of gentians are less showy. Another choice - the fern. We had chosen the low golden-locks (Polypodium vulgare), growing on the
the stone which has scaled with time. This plant, if to judge by its name, is completely usual, but we didn't meet it anywhere else exept Caucasus.
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Carlica acaulis is an eminently unusual plant: its inflorescence is lying on the ground like the "Order of Caucasus". It has already passed through the phase of flowering, but we could collect the seed with special parachutes, like the ones of dandelion. The Campanula looks fine: the whole fields are full of silken purple-azure flowers. Last year we stopped on the beach of lake Cyltrankel and had a problem where to find the place for our tents. All the meadows were covered by the blowing bellflowers.
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The violets here are very interesting - rather big, with outer diameter equal to 4-5 sm. They have two different colours - blue-purple and yellow-white (probably, the albino form). At home we see the numerous kinds of violets in the gardens, for example, the "love-in-idleness", which are the hybrids of the different native and foreign species. Here eou may watch a violet (genus Viola, species Violaceae) in its primary nature.
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It's a lot of plants among the family of Scrophulariaceae. These ones are spread widely in the midlatitudes. They include a lot of ornamental and medicinal plants, and some of them, for example, antirrhinum is grown in the gardens. We had met two species of Pedicularis. The first one (Pedicularis verticullata) had the red stalks and flowers. Another one looks rather exotically - with yellow flowers, covered with thick hair like dressed in a fur coat.
These plants are so very much ornamental, that it's surprising, why they do not present in the rock-gardens. Probably, they sustain their compact size in the hard conditions of high mountains only.
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Veronica anagallis belongs to the same plant family. Its main features are the two stamens with naked threads.
To my mind another plant, suitable for the rock-garden, is the unusual kind of Gagea with big flowers. This plant belongs to the family of Liliaceae, which includes lilies, tulips, May lilies. We watch Gagea mainly alongside the watercourse of small rivers.
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The Alpine asters you may meet very often. These flowers belong to the aster family (Asteraceae) or the thistle family (Compositae). These pink flowers have acomposite anthodium with femail elements near to the max radius and the yellow cannular androgynous ones near the center.
A lot of well-known plants belongs to the thistle family:
helianthus, chrysanthemum, marigold. And also - camomile tinctorial (Anthemis tinctoria), the distant relation to our wild camomile.
Somewhere we found the multiyear grass arnica (Arnica Montana). It's another member of the thistle family. Some species are used in medicine as a cholagogue or haemostatic.
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Sometimes we met Anemones from the ranunculaceous family (Ranunculaceae) and the Alpine forget-me-nots (Myosotis alpestris) from borage
family (Boraginaceae). A lot of plants are analogous to the ones, spread in the moderate climate, but they have the difference. This why we often defined only the plants' family and genus, hoping to determine the species later.
After studying the flowers of the Alpine meadows we continued our way. We go higher. Here, atop of ridges, where even the soil is absent, where there is an assemblage of bare rocks and perpetual snows, you may see the cortical lichens on the stones. There are the special representative of the plant kingdom, which could find the means to live in the hard conditions.
That year the weather was very bad for ascents and we descend the hills. Yes, we couldn't conquer Elborus, but we took the numerous samples of plants digged up from Alpine meadows. Certainly, in the moderate climate of Russia these plants will not find the same energy of sun they had in the mountains. But we ought to consider the value of years' temperature as main factor of the succesful introduction, not the intensity of lightness. And from the position it's no great difference between the climate of Alpine meadows and Moscow Region. However, the
lack of sun's rays sometimes causes the changes in the shape and development of the cultural mountain plants: they heighten and begin to bloom and fruit earlier.
Many species of mountain plants are used in the gardens as the cultural ones. The gardeners know them and like the different forms of the flowers: the big ones, the especially decorative ones, the more modest and miniature ones. We prefer the low-key and handsome flowers and try to take them from the mountains and then to grow these unusual plants in our gardens.
Nickolai Nosov, text and photos - 2002
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