Edelweiss

Edelweiss is a small mountain flower of the daisy family, Asteraceae, whose German name means 'noble white'. It grows on limestone rock and scree at about 1,800 to 3,400 metres in the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Apennines and parts of the Balkans. Its leaves and flowers are clothed in dense white wool that shields the plant from cold, drought and ultraviolet light. Each flowering stalk, three to twenty centimetres tall in the wild, carries five or six tight clusters of small yellow florets ringed by felted white bracts in a double star, and blooms from July to September. Alpine folk medicine took it for stomach pains and other complaints, which earned it the name bellyache flower, and it kept well in dried bouquets. In the nineteenth century it became the emblem of the Alps and of mountaineers, the badge of Austro-Hungarian mountain troops and a symbol of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and overpicking led to its protection in many places. A Swiss legend makes it a young woman who died of loneliness on a snowy summit; a man who climbed to pick it for his sweetheart proved his devotion, and giving it to a loved one is a promise of dedication. Owning one was thought lucky. In Tyrol a wreath of it made the wearer invisible, it served as a charm against lightning, and in Germany a flower wrapped in white linen in the pocket turned aside bullets and daggers.