INTRODUCTION. 
treatments and compare notes on diet, and bicker over the merits 
of their respective diagnoses. Very sound work is now being done 
in studying the chemistry of soils, and the precise conditions of 
moisture and nutrition. We are no longer empirical; scientific 
experiments are made in even the sacred corpus—by no means 
“vile ’—of Campanula alpestris; and at least one brilliantly 
successful cultivator achieves his gardening by going round with 
a barrowful of medicine bottles, administering to each difficult 
plant in turn a teaspoonful three times a day of its own especial 
dose; while yet another, in a series of back yards, leads all the 
highest alpines by the nose, with a succession of scientifically 
compounded and drifted rubbish-heaps. 
Such high flights are not as yet within reach of the beginner. 
But there is no doubt that along these lines the triumphs of the 
future lie. Our successes will no longer be haphazard, at the end 
of a long line of failures, but will be assured and certain from 
the beginning, on a basis of sound knowledge. For instance, the 
long-vexed question of lime-loving versus lime-hating plants has 
caused as much ink to flow as any holy dogma of Christendom. 
Nature confronts us with endless and suggestive inconsistencies ; 
there are species absolutely faithful to the limestone, such as 
Phyteuma comosum, others indifferent, as the Flannel Flower 
(Edelweiss) ; many are constant to the granite in nature, abhor- 
ring limestone, yet in the average garden seem careless on 
the point; while yet other granite-lovers appear irrecon- 
cilable to lime in cultivation. But now we know the com- 
plete answer to the riddle: all plants of every sort require 
lime, to a greater or less degree. The gardener’s quest is 
to discover what dose of lime is helpful, and what harmful, to 
each particular species. This quest, again, is further complicated 
by the clear fact that each garden has an effect of its own upon 
the plant’s disposition in the matter, and that the degree of toler- 
ance engendered by different cultural conditions depends upon 
deep laws to which science is only beginning to dig down. All 
naturally lime-loving plants give no trouble ; they can hardly have 
too much of their native element, yet sometimes (as Saxifraga 
xli 
