EDELWEISS: RARE TREASURE OR INVASIVE WEED?

One of the delights of wandering Alpine paths is the search for edelweiss -- delicate and white and shy, surviving in valiant patches in out-of-the-way spots.


And so it was at 8000 feet (2600 meters) we found a tiny outcropping of struggling plants -- the outstanding exemplars having only 3 or 4 tentative shoots. Imagine our surprise then, when we started to notice bountiful edelweiss plants decorating the planters and hotel fronts of downtown Zermatt.

Their robust gray, white, and yellow seemed perfectly suited to the muted metal of an antique pot at the Hotel Admiral -- or set off the vivid pansies in their streetside planters.

At the venerable Monte Rosa -- the Zermatt hotel on the Bahnhofstrasse whose original three spartan rooms housed English climbers including Edward Whymper before his attempts at the Matterhorn in the 1860s -- a pair of potted blue spruces, underlaid with edelweiss and wrapped in flocked red ribbon, flanked the front doors.

In the old town, a fountain is dedicated to the memory of Ulrich Unterbinden, the legendary local moutain guide who passed away in 2004 at the age of 104 after reportedly climbing Mt. Cervin (as it's known in French) more than 100 times. Near the fountain lives a new planting of edelweiss, native purple fireweed, and one uncharacteristic, large green weed.

But that's not all.  Even the lowliest pension sports a planter full of edelweiss, mint, and petunias to advertise available rooms!

And then we discovered the mother lode: The new flower shop was geing populated with racks and racks of potted edelweiss, apparently shipped up the valley from Brig, where it might have been started from seed or perhaps even tissue culture.  

You could buy a robust pot for 12 Swiss francs or Chf (about $15 at the current exchange rate) or the self-same pot tucked into a colorful gift bag  and arrayed across the front steps for 18 Chf. 

The next day, when we wandered past the florist again, we found that even the delivery boxes had been pressed into service as display cases for the newest plant to invade Zermatt.

THE KITCHEN GARDENS OF ZERMATT

You won’t find tomatoes, and you usually won’t find weeds. It’s still too cold at night to put out tomato plants by late July, and weeds are an unwelcome pest that would consume valuable garden resources in Zermatt, high in the Valais canton of southern Switzerland.

What you will find in this tightly packed village are verdant salad gardens, lush potato patches, and orderly, thoughtful use of precious space.  Tucked into every conceivable patch of land, a productive kitchen garden seems a necessity of life to many Zermatt families.

Locating a garden in Zermatt is more like planning an urban plot than starting a country potager. Space is at a premium in this mountain valley, where every buildable piece of land with a Matterhorn view commands top value.  Landowners must use any sunny spot that’s handy and available – and use it wisely.   

Finding a Spot

Tucked between the Vispa River, which flows from the high Alps down to the Rhone River, and a rock face that edges one side of the valley, this small garden provides succulent green and red lettuces for guests at this hotel.  Native purple fireweed growing on the hillside and hybrid geraniums on the balconies enhance the colorful scene.
 

Keeping It Beautiful

In other cases, the gardener may decorate the garden plot with lavender or other flowering plants.

Too Beautiful to Harvest?

It’s difficult to find a garden that shows the signs of recent harvesting. The plot pictured below offers a rare example that the owners have recently removed lettuce plants.  Because of the cool nights (~10C or 50F), the lettuce rarely bolts, so the mature plants can be held in the garden until needed for the table.

Succession planting is also evident in the rows of Quatre Saisons type of red-tipped lettuce in the foreground.

Fitting it All In

Potatoes –a staple of the Alpine diet – grow abundantly at right in the picture below, while a generous patch of parsley plants is being started in the foreground. At left you can see part of a late pea bed, supported with sticks and string.  A few cabbage plants are tucked into an empty space. Beyond the fence, a patch of raspberries is trained on stakes and wires.

Thoughtful Replanting

Because space is at a premium, the gardener in another plot found it wise to tuck a late crop of red and green lettuces among the ripening onions.

Straight to the Table

Bottom line: the freshest imaginable lettuce comes straight to your lunch or dinner table in crunchy salads that satisfy and nourish. 



And you can be sure they've come from one of the local "lettuce factories" -- like the generous tract we sighted when walking through the Winkelmatten district in the southern end of town.

A WALK IN THE HILLS

It was what we call "a perfect Swiss day." The sun was out, even though it was cool, and a soft breeze blew across the town. We made the 1 km+ walk across town to the Furi lift (up toward the Matterhorn, another 1 km in a gondola lift, to save time), then started a leisurely walk up toward the farming village with the delightful name of Zmutt. As we walked, we were trying to remember (1- he) the name of a local mountain brook with a stunning waterfall (Findelbach), (2 - she) the name of the sugar/almond paste confection used to shape fruits, vegetables, and little animals in European countries (marzipan). Turns out, it's hard to climb uphill and remember lost nouns at the same time -- the blood supply needed by the brain must be shunted off to the muscles!

At Zmutt, we headed for the sun deck at Jaegerstube, one of our favorite mountain restaurants, and order the house kaeseschnitte ("baked cheese sandwich") -- a dish that contains crispy country bread, grated cheese and onions, fried eggs, sliced ham, tomatoe, and garnished with dill pickle and cocktail onions. After a short rest in the sun to digest, we climbed away from the restaurant, past a penned herd of cattle, calves, and a single bull, with bells tolling and one Mom bellowing to be milked. The meadow path climbed up another 500 feet or so, and passed through magical carpets of wildflowers of all shapes and colors -- gentians and bellflowers, white Alpine dasies and purple asters, yellow saxifrages, pink dianthus, thrift, and rock mosses. I couldn't resist settling into the grass.

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Our high meadow walk offered an excellent view down to the (nearly empty) silting pond for the Grand Dixence in the background. The GD is an amazing Swiss engineering project which provides several hundred megawatts of hydroelectric power for Western Switzerland. (According to Wikipedia, the Valais canton contains 56% of Switzerland's  glaciers and stores the largest amount of water in Europe. Power is extracted at several stations as the water falls down thousands of feet to the Rhone River.)  In the background at the end of the valley, is the Arbenhang -- a large hanging glacier that is melting and retreating rapidly.

Vacations are best in large spaces, with a lot of sky.

The walk was a total of about 5 miles -- including the walk through the "city" of Zermatt and back to the hotel -- with just over a thousand feet up and down. That's enough that we'll feel it in the thighs tomorrow.

THE TIDAL MATTERHORN

The tourist who arrives in Zermatt never knows what s/he'll find... Will the Matterhorn be hiding in the clouds, or standing proud?  We arrived to find the mountain coy, with snow collecting secretly behind the shroud of fog and haze. Pity the poor tourist who spends a day (or several), and never sees any more than this.

We were lucky. A good west wind was blowing the clouds out, and when we woke the next morning, there was the mountain -- freshly snow-clad.

Wandering about the town on the first day we could not help but notice the streets were more navigable than they had been in years. The dining room in our hotel was far quieter than usual, with no familiar faces from previous visits. Few English-speaking voices, but instead an unaccustomed mix of Spanish, Norwegian, and random Europeans. The tourists we did encounter included a generous mix of Japanese (apparently travelling on prepaid tours arranged before their national calamity in March) and Middle Eastern families.

We asked our friend at the news kiosk for his view of the situation: "An absolute disaster," was his assessment. Bookings have been abysmal, businesses in town have been struggling and shuttering. The tourist traffic is rapidly disappearing, due to the disastrous exchange rate of the strong Swiss franc and the ongoing world recession. He showed us the inch-high headline from today's Swiss Blick, the national photo tabloid: "Will the Franc Explode Today?" (Heute Explodiert der Franc?) it asked, as the EU ministers met to find a way to ward off Greek default.

RETURN TO ZERMATT

It was snowing on the Matterhorn when we arrived. Rain and 50 degrees in Zurich -- a welcome change from the high 90s we had escaped when we left Boston.

We intermittently napped and gazed at the verdant Swiss countryside as the intercity train carried us across the plain and through the new Lötschberg Base Tunnel to Visp, where the Vispa River cascades down from the Matterhown. As we emerged from the 21.5 mile tunnel (the world's longest, completed in 2007 at a cost of some 5.3 billion Swiss francs), the sun emerged, and bathed the hillside vineyards in an almost-Mediterranean light.

You know you're back in the Valais when you board the five-car Matterhorn-St. Gotthardbahn in Visp. There were once 13 separate cog sections to pull the train from Visp (alt. 1200 m. -- or 4000 ft.) to Zermatt (alt. 1620 -- 5300 ft.) in a matter of 19 miles. The tracks have recently been updated, with occasional waiting sections where trains can shunt aside to accommodate the steady flow of upward- and downward-bound passenger and freight transports that ply the valley each day.

The rails snake alongside the riverbed -- straining in the steepest sections, then hurling across the flatter sections near the villages of Stalden (where you transfer if you're going to Sass-Fee); St. Niklaus (which has carved a tourist industry from the patron saint of Christmas); Randa (site of a memorable landslide that caused a flood of the Visp River in the early 1990s); and finally Täsch, where all tourists must leave their cars and board the train for the final climb to the Zermatt bahnhof.

As the hillsides steepened, Jack could see traces of last night's snow melting on the hilltops. Ahead, the highest mountains wove in and out of view as the train continued its hourlong ascent. And sure enough, when the Matterhorn came into sight, the peak was engulfed in a cloud of snow and fog. Overnight we had left behind the summer heat and climbed into a crisp new universe -- a magic mountain for refreshment and renewal.

AWAY FROM THE CROWDS: A WALK IN THE WOODS

In our summertime treks to Lenox, MA, we never fail to stop at Chesterwood, the summer home and studio of Daniel Chester French, who created the Minuteman statue in Concord, MA, and most importantly, the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C. With a prospect to Monument Mountain in Glendale, MA,  French considered it the "greatest view possible ... without water."

There's a restful woodland walk which is populated every summer by a curated sculpture exhibit -- some 25 or so works nestled in woodland grottos, in the trees, on the lawns and meadows. Here are a couple of favorite animal sculptures from this year's collection:  a herd of cattle that's a flat panel cut from steel (Ironherd by Anne Huibregtse), but which looks like it stretches back into the meadow, and a hollow bear constructed from old barn wood (Bear Walking by Robert Rothschild), which captures "bearness" in its details  as you move around it.

There's a even an idyllic picnic area in an old apple orchard. Chesterwood is a little-known treasure, just 1/4 mile from the Norman Rockwell Museum (which gets much more traffic).

SEROTONIN FROM THE SOIL?

A few years back, Discover magazine in an article called "Is Dirt the New Prozac?" reported studies indicating that treatment with an "inoffensive" soil bacterium, Mycobacterium vaccae, may be able to alleviate depression. Christopher Lowry, a neuroscientist at the University of Bristol in England, had a hunch about how this process might work. "What we think happens is that the bacteria activate immune cells, which release chemicals called cytokines that then act on receptors on the sensory nerves to increase their activity." This terrific news has made me anxious to get out and dig holes for herbs and tie up my tomatoes (again).  I read somewhere that tomatoes like to be touched -- that handling them stimulates faster growth.

Real comfort food is food you grow yourself. The man behind the fish counter at Whole Foods talked about the rising cost of food. He said his family has planted a large garden this summer. That's certainly a great benefit -- from a 10 cent seed you can get a whole basket full of tomatoes. And it's fresh and right there "in the walk-in pantry." I've loved the cut-and-come again fresh greens from Johnny's Seeds, and am enjoying the taste explosions that come from tossing fresh herbs into salads or onto vegetables and sauces. Why buy basil for $3.49 a bunch when you can buy a pot for the same price, snip a sprig or two and then let it grow on, rather than wilting in the frig? We will have bounteous cucumbers, and one of my Imperial Star artichokes has a bud forming. Bliss.

I've been reading Eliot Coleman, and planning a fall crop of salad greens which I'll protect with row covers and/or cold frames.