18 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
Japanese treasures that I nurse in my rock-garden. And 
nothing—not even if they grew to the size of St. Paul’s— 
should deprive me of the Japanese Cherries, single and 
double, rosy, white, and yellow (though the Yellow 
Cherry, indeed, is more alluring in idea than in reality, 
being of a faint, greenish-sulphur shade, which is very 
effective on a big, well-flowered tree, but mean and 
depressing on a small, young specimen). 
Of the other Cherries, the dwarf rare Cerasus pro- 
strata, is best for the rock-garden, while of the Plums, 
glorious Mumé is, I begin to fear, of uncertain flower- 
ing in my climate, like several of the Pyruses, which 
perhaps I don’t treat properly, especially Pyrus spec- 
tabilis, the most beautiful of all, of which young plants 
from Japan blossomed last season till their frail 
branches creaked beneath their burden of rose and ruby 
snow—and this year are nothing but shoot and leatage. 
Perhaps pruning will help the Japanese Plum. Or does 
it require more summer ripening? In Japan it makes 
so bewildering a spectacle of beauty through grey, icy 
March, that one would spare no pains to have it in 
England doing likewise, if possible. The two giant 
plants in my shrubbery are two specimens I bought for 
a shilling each at a night-fair in Tokio. ‘They lived in 
my house for a fortnight—sheer indistinguishable balls 
of white and pink. Now they have shot up and 
about like Jack’s beanstalk, waving enormous whip-cord 
shoots. And they each average perhaps five blooms a year. 
The same trouble attends my culture of Chimonanthus 
fragrans, that most heavenly- scented of all heaven- 
scented flowers. Long had I known of it, and never 
seen it, till one day I walked in a certain lovely garden 
on the Genoese Riviera. And there, in a cold, shaded 
corner, chill with January’s frost in unsunned aspects, I 
was transplanted to heaven on the wings of an ineffable 
