The Flower Closest to the Rock
Most people remember the first one they saw.
That has less to do with how the flower looks than with how much attention it takes to see it at all. It is small, it is pale, and it sits close to the ground.
A Plant from the Desert
The emblem of the Alps did not come from the Alps.
Its ancestors grew on the hot, dry highlands of Central Asia, where most of the thirty or so species of its genus still grow. It reached Europe relatively late, spreading west during the last glaciations and settling in these mountains as the ice pulled back.
Which explains the part almost everybody gets wrong. The white wool covering the plant looks like insulation against cold. What it actually does is stop the plant losing water, the same adaptation you find in plants of hot, arid places. The flower wears in the Dolomites a coat it developed in a desert.
The most Alpine thing in the collection came from somewhere else and stayed.
How the White Is Made
The white star is not made of petals. Those pale rays are bracts, modified leaves, and the real flowers are the small yellow heads clustered in the middle of them.
The white is not a pigment either. The hairs covering the bracts are extremely fine, twisted and tangled together, and they trap thousands of minute bubbles of air between them. The bubbles reflect the light. What you are looking at is whiteness produced by structure rather than by colour, which is a thing anyone who has worked with fibre will recognise.
The hairs do something else as well. Under an electron microscope they turn out to be hollow, and ridged along their length at a scale of roughly 180 nanometres. That structure absorbs ultraviolet light before it reaches the living tissue underneath, by absorption rather than by reflection, which is the opposite of what had been assumed. The physicists who published the finding in 2005 called it one of the few photonic structures known in a plant.
The study, by Vigneron and colleagues, appeared in Physical Review E.
Three Names
Three languages have looked at this plant and seen three different things.
Italian saw a star and called it stella alpina. German saw whiteness and nobility and called it Edelweiss. The botanist Robert Brown, naming the genus in 1817, saw an animal: Leontopodium, from the Greek for lion's foot, because the woolly bracts curve around the flower heads the way claws curve out of a paw.
A star, a piece of nobility, and an animal's foot. The valley underneath has spent centuries being read in three languages as well.
What You Cannot Take Home
For generations people carried the flowers down. Pressed into books, tucked into hat bands, handed over as proof of a walk or as a declaration of something else. One flower was nothing. The same gesture repeated by thousands of people every summer was not nothing.
The rules arrived earlier than most people assume. Valle d'Aosta was debating protection in 1956, and put the edelweiss first on the list of plants that needed it. Trentino passed its law on alpine flora in 1973, the province of Sondrio listed the species in 1979, Friuli did the same.
Italy has no single national rule. Every region and autonomous province writes its own, which makes the agreement about this one plant more striking. Other mountain flowers are allowed in limited numbers, a few stems per person per day. The stella alpina is consistently on the other list, the one where picking it is simply forbidden.
Meanwhile the flower became purchasable. Nurseries grow it now, and a cultivated stella alpina can be bought and kept in a pot a long way from any mountain. This has taken pressure off the wild plants, and there is nothing wrong with it. The physicists who worked out how the hairs absorb ultraviolet light used cultivated specimens too. It does mean that something which used to require a walk, some patience and a certain amount of luck can now simply be ordered.
Finding one still ends differently. You look, and then you keep walking with nothing in your hand except the memory of where it was.
Why It Is on the Linen
The flower's reputation is louder than the flower. It appears on signs, on souvenirs, on objects with no connection to the ground it grows on, and the repetition is not its fault.
Seeing a real one depends on paying attention, and that is the quality the embroidery is after. It reproduces no landscape and makes no attempt to turn a table Alpine. It holds the shape of the flower and nothing more, worked in thread and left with space around it on the oatmeal linen.
A napkin gets unfolded. A basket goes across the table. Then the stella alpina appears, to whoever happened to be looking.
You cannot bring the flower down from the mountain. What comes home is the memory of having found one.
Where does edelweiss originally come from?
Not the Alps. Its ancestors grew on the dry highlands of Central Asia, where most species of the genus still grow, and the plant spread west during the last glaciations.
Why is edelweiss white and woolly?
The white star is made of bracts rather than petals, covered in fine tangled hairs that trap thousands of air bubbles and reflect light. The wool also limits water loss and absorbs ultraviolet radiation before it reaches the living tissue.
Is it illegal to pick edelweiss in Italy?
There is no single national rule, but the regions and autonomous provinces where the plant grows list it among the species that cannot be picked at all, rather than among those allowed in limited numbers.
Previously: A Village That Learned to Receive the World · Before the Chairlift · The Mountain Does Not Need to Be Added · Aperitivo, Back Inside
All Capsule Cortina stories
Small enough to be found by whoever is looking.