156 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
gravel, or flow down a salutary slope. But wherever 
your soil is retentive, it will always be wisest to give the 
garden a fair start by preparing the ground thoroughly 
beforehand, and arming it against catastrophes. Your 
ultimate success will trebly and quadruply repay your 
initial trouble. Never scant initial trouble, never despise 
it. Half the world’s horticultural tragedies arise because 
gardeners, for one reason or another, fail to make their 
preparations complete, fail to be thorough with the long, 
tiresome, and sometimes expensive preparatory measures. 
Neglect initial precautions, save a few sixpences in the 
matter of drainage, concrete or what not, when you are 
making your garden, and you will certainly have to spend 
many sad laborious years, and many unprofitable pounds, 
in trying vainly to make good your own deficiencies, to 
do, with difficulty and pain, what might and should have 
been done properly and easily at first. For it is never 
easy to make good an error; a thing obvious and simple 
to do in its own good time, becomes difficult and dreadful 
to accomplish when its time has gone by ; and very rarely, 
with great trouble and misery, can one ever catch up the 
lost years, and make a tardy botch of what should have 
been a simple, workmanly job in the earliest beginning of 
one’s scheme. 
I speak all this feelingly; I was seduced, in the far- 
off years when I was making the Old Garden, and worrying, 
through my own ignorance, into saving labour here, and 
saving labour there, into allowing thoroughness of work 
to pass as insignificant, into yielding to various pernicious 
‘dodges,’ because they were cheap. Result: the Old 
Garden for years has been a sore burden, an unrewarding 
toil, a daughter of the horseleech in its rapacity. Money 
in floods has been poured down its bottomless gullet of 
late seasons, in a vain effort to reclaim it; and it is only 
now, after ten struggling years of failure, that the thing 
