If you look at a mountain you can see different regions of vegetation. At the bottom of the mountain are forests, above the forests are meadows and above the meadows small plants grow among the rocks. The reason for these different zones of plants is due to the environmental conditions.

At the bottom of the mountain there are warm summers and cool winters. Broadleaved trees such as the oak are adapted to these conditions and grow in such large numbers that they make a woodland.

As you move higher up the mountain the conditions become cooler. Oak trees cannot survive here and are replaced by conifers. These trees have dark green leaves all through the year. These two features adapt the trees for survival on the mountain side. By having leaves on the branches all year round the tree is ready to make food whenever there is enough sunlight. The speed with which a leaf makes food depends on its temperature. A warm leaf makes more food than a cold leaf. The darkness of the conifer leaves help them to absorb heat from the suns rays so they can make food fast when the Sun shines. The leaves are coated in wax which makes snow slip off them easily and they have flexible trunks and branches which bend in high winds without snapping. The soil in the coniferous forest is thin but conifers have shallow roots which spread out to collect all the water and minerals that are needed to help the tree grow and reproduce.

There is a height on the side of a mountain called the tree line; below it conifer trees can survive, but above the tree line even a conifer cannot survive. The zone above the tree line is the summer meadow. Here the ground is covered in grasses and plants which produce bright flowers such as the buttercup and wild lupin. The large number of plants survive in the meadow because the soil, is thick enough to support them but further up the soil is thinner and there are areas just covered in bare rocks.

Some plants are adapted to live in the pockets of soil between the rocks in the very cold, windy, environmental conditions near the mountain top. They may have leaves covered in hair to keep them warm in winter or have dark coloured leaves to warm up fast when the Sun shines in the short summer.

You may not expect to find any living things on the surface of bare rock near a mountain top but you would be wrong. You may find some oval shaped crusty growths. They are not flowering plants. They are lichens. A lichen has two parts to it. One part is made by a fungus and the other part is made by algae. The two parts live together in harmony. The fungus gives the algae the support it needs to live on the rock and the algae gives the fungus the food it needs to grow and hold them both in place.