INTRODUCTION 
PROCLAMATIONS of purpose are often confessions of failure to 
achieve it. At the same time, so vast a tome as this cannot be 
allowed to burst upon the world unheralded by some sort of ex- 
cuse for its vastness. It owes its existence then, first of all, to my 
own craving for guidance across the uncharted seas of catalogues. 
We are all rock-gardeners nowadays, and the more we grow, the 
more we desire to grow, and the more we want to know about 
the plants we are offered, no less than about the plants we possess. 
That this necessity for novelty may be fed we are deluged daily 
with successions of the most seductive catalogues, which draw 
the last penny from our purses with their promises. But these 
catalogues, by the very conditions of their being, are succinct 
advertisements, rather than helpful guides. Their purpose is not 
so much to assist as to allure: they cannot, for considerations of 
space, be produced upon a scale that will make them valuable 
documents for the cultivator. Another fault they have, to 
which I will return later. So what are we to do, when we are 
offered Heeria or Weldenia at high prices, with the brief annota- 
tion that they are pink or white in the flower as the case may 
be? It is very easy to answer, “ Abstain”: what gardener 
worthy of his garden can bear to follow a counsel so craven 2 
So we buy—we “ plunge ” courageously upon a plant of whose 
requirements, habits, and hardiness we are left entirely ignorant ; 
for the great authorities of the past are silent in the present, and 
the English Flower Garden has long been crying for an English 
Rock Garden, to supplement the errors and partialities which afflict 
the occasional alpines that have to take their chance in its pages 
among the vast mass of general herbaceous “ stuff” with which 
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