INTRODUCTION. 
gardening, like all great arts, is not imitative, but selective and 
adaptive. Vast congeries of rounded boulders are “ natural,” 
but neither beautiful nor helpful in the rock-garden; lowering 
kopjes of up-ended spikes and obelisks, ragged, vast, and gaunt, 
are frequent in the granitic ranges, but in the rock-garden are 
presumptuous, violent, and disproportionate in effect ; unless the 
composition be on the very vastest scale, and then pyramids of 
chaos can close some deep and huge ravine. Even so, a mountain 
of stratified limestone would better suit the harmony of the whole. 
Of another fault beware: do not let your garden, large or small, 
ever lose its look of connectedness and harmony as it grows. Too 
many zealous and beautiful compilations have I seen that spoil 
themselves by adding hummock to hummock, or long potato- 
ridge to potato-ridge, appended each to each with no regard to 
harmony or unity, till the whole effect is that of a disconnected 
and haphazard collection of pudding-hke palaeolithic barrows, or 
ill-conceived ramparts. Additions should always be made with 
a most careful eye to what has gone before. The scheme and site 
of the garden should always be so chosen as to admit of extensions 
that shall immediately fall into union with the original design, 
instead of hanging on to it irrelevantly like ill-judged appendages, 
and revealing themselves for the additions that they are. 
No more advice can be given on design. Each site dictates 
its own, and each owner’s taste must do the rest. Let but the 
foregoing suggestions be pondered, and, whatever the result may 
be, whether mountain, mound, gorge, or bank or valley, it will 
not prove an amorphous or disconnected huddle of stones, nor 
an unpropitious pyramid of spikes. 
So comes the actual building, which must be firm and solid 
as it goes, proceeding upward from the base, burying stone by 
stone immovably in its place, and, as the building grows, watching 
from each point in turn to see that every stone you add falls 
inevitably into its place in the scheme, joins hands with its 
neighbours, and helps with all its forces in the work of harmony. 
Be sure the work is firm and solid. 
Be sure that the soil is firmly rammed into every crevice and 
(1,919) Xxxlii c 
