158 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
to make all the difference between a garden that is a 
pleasure alike to the owner and to the plants that live in 
it and a garden which is nothing but a perennial anxiety 
and expense. For, if you build well at the start, your 
money will come flowing back to you, multiplied, through 
a thousand channels. Spend a little more—ever so little 
more at the beginning, and you will be spending less and 
less, making more and more, as the seasons go by. Put 
a rare, valuable plant in ill-prepared, faulty ground; it 
dies or dwindles; plant it well, in well-planned territory, 
and it grows ever stronger and stouter from year to year, 
yielding you younglings, and affording you perpetual 
pleasure. In renewal-money, saddest of expenses, proper 
initial care will save you fortunes; for, with proper 
preparation of your ground, you will rarely need to fill up 
vacancies left by deplorable demises among your treasures. 
Let my ideal bog-garden flow down converging slopes, 
and fill a broad hollow. Let its sparse rocks be porous 
and water-worn—either of light powdery tuff, or of the 
gnarled, fretted mountain-limestone. Let its aspect have 
a rich peace, untroubled by ambitious violent features, 
pinnacles, bridges, uneasy, fussy adornments. ‘Through 
the middle, perhaps, among tangled thickets of Iris, a 
stream may meander; but, for the most part, I incline to 
the opinion that in a small place water had better be a 
haunting pervasive influence than an actual visible force. 
In my own gardens, flowing water serves its turn; but as 
a rule, it is difficult to look after, to keep clear of weeds and 
leaves, to hold in its course. Nor is it of any effect unless 
the stream be a big one. And in any case water, running 
or staying, is an uncommonly hard and expensive servant 
to control. ‘lherefore, for general advice, I should say, 
let there be abundant moisture, yet none to see. But, 
of course, if space and water be at your disposal—space 
and such unhusbanded fountains as bless our Northern 
