THE MOUNTAIN BOG 215 
CHAPTER X13 
The Wountain Bog 
Anp now, having clothed the high banks and outlying 
copsy slopes of our ideal dell, let us gladly come to the 
furnishing of the choice open space in the middle, where 
a tank of concrete, as large as you can make it, has been 
filled with light and pleasant soil, provided with drainage- 
holes and outlets, and given a gentle little brook to 
meander across its surface. Not, as I have said before— 
and now repeat for the encouragement of the dispirited— 
not that the concrete tank is at all inevitably necessary. 
If you have drainage, and running water, and light rich 
soil, you will have no need of it; the concrete tank is 
simply my ideal precaution which can never do any harm, 
and which may, in a blazing climate, devoid of rain, and 
on a parching sandy soil, devoid of nutritious elements 
and running water, give you lasting joy in a bog-garden 
where you otherwise could not have one at all. Of 
course, where ideals are to be talked of, probabilities no 
longer count; and I will now be brave enough to say 
that in my own dearest, most private ideal, the choice 
bog-garden shall not be, as I have so far timidly pre- 
tended, in the depth of a shallow dell or hollow, ringed 
in by lush leafage of lily and fern and giant harebell. 
No; it shall be high up—high, high up, on a bare 
shoulder of the rock-work. Behind it lofty cliffs of stone 
shall converge to a cafion at the end, through which a 
