218 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
tion. And if people would only realise how little stone 
is necessary to the good rock-garden, they would also 
realise, as one pleasant consequence among many, how 
cheap and easy it is to make a rock-garden. You don’t 
want many rocks, nor mighty ones; you want skill and 
discernment in placing the very few you really require. 
Let this encourage many thousands more to cultivate 
Alpines. 
I think that of all corners of the world the Alpine bog 
is the most wholly sparkling and deifying there can be. 
Hemmed in by the rich heaviness of tropical forests, I 
gasp and catch my breath at the memory of certain 
glittering Oread-haunted meadows, ten thousand feet 
above the ordinary world. The thought of them, amid 
the dense warmth, is a sudden plunge into water cold 
and clear and radiant as diamond; it arrests the pulses 
of the heart for a dizzy instant, then sets them leaping 
forward with redoubled zeal.—Or perhaps it is the naked, 
lonely valley of Upper Tees, rolling away in mile after 
mile of purple and yellow Pansies, girt in by huge slug- 
gish hills, and filled with a clean silence and an utter 
loneliness beyond imagination. Here, on broken places 
above the little bogs, shine in the short herbage wide 
stars of Gentiana verna. UHere the soaking shingle of 
the streams is tufted with golden masses of Savifraga 
acizoeides, and on their banks rise the dull violet spikes 
of Bartsia alpina. Long and faithful search, perhaps, will 
show you treasures even more sacrosanct—fair frail 
Arenaria uliginosa, in the marshes of Widdy Bank, and 
Viola arenaria on dry patches of the upper slopes; or 
Savifraga Hirculus, dwindling to extinction in the very 
stream-bed of Cronkley. High in black humus-bogs of 
the Fell lives tiny, fairy-like Thalictrwm alpinum, and 
Rubus Chamaemorus makes carpets of its vine-like leaves 
over the upmost moors. 
