INTRODUCTION. 
loam, leaf-mould, and manure. This should be well-blended, 
and compacted into a neat dumpling. Then the fat white roots 
should be splayed out in the spongy mass and covered over. 
Turn on the water now, and fill the pool; no matter how small 
may be the inserted fragments of your expensive Nymphaeas, 
and how great the apparently hopeless depth of water covering 
them, the summer will not be old before they have reached the 
surface and expanded a few glowing crowns, in earnest of the 
abundance which they will thenceforth never fail to produce 
through all succeeding seasons. 
Its Plants—Our plants, unlike patronage, come to us from 
the South, East, and West, as well asthe North. There is no limit 
to their beauty and variety, nor any keeping abreast with the — 
ever-rolling stream of novelties that is nowadays setting so 
strongly towards us from China and other paradises of the Little 
People. This book will be out of date before it is in proof, nor 
can it do more than give a guess at what wonders may still be 
lurking in wait for us. However, with regard to what we hope, 
as with what we have, we may augur the best. For a long time 
a superstitious terror hung round alpine plants. They were 
talked of in awful whispers, cultivated timorously in frames, and 
not even allowed to be hardy. Those were the sad, and mad, and 
bad old days of pockets, which were not even sweet; “ rockeries ” 
were clayey mounds, or dogs’ graves, or almond puddings of spikes, 
or rooteries, or dank depressions in the woodland. The plants 
invariably died; and alpines, like orchids, acquired a name for 
difficulty and danger that neither race deserves. These clouds, 
however, have long since rolled away, and now, granted the abso- 
lute essentials of a free soil, perfect drainage, and an open aspect, 
the enormous majority of mountain plants prove more satis- 
factory in our hands, more promptly and abundantly repaying, 
than any other class of garden delights ; for now we cultivate our 
species, we no longer “cover our rockeries.” Now we study 
the nature, character, temper, and digestion of each plant, as if 
we recognised in it, indeed, a near relation. Hrudite physicians 
gather in conclave over this or that valetudinarian, and excogitate 
xl 
