INTRODUCTION. 
and out of the rivalry each develops especial happiness and vigour 
in the company of the other. From the point of view that concerns 
the health of the plants, an interwoven carpet of colours is the 
effect to be aimed at; and to attain this by wise and well-balanced 
juxtapositions will always be the aim of the wise gardener, and 
the triumph of the successful and experienced one. A well- 
cultivated stretch of rock-work should look as if it were not 
cultivated at all, sheeted carpets of colour succeeding each other 
through the year automatically, spontaneous and apparently 
untended. Many associations are suggested in the course of 
this book, alike for health and for colour-contrasts, but they 
are only a tithe of those that enthusiasts may well think out, 
appreciating, as they must, the importance of the point, no less 
than the nice adjustment and knowledge required, if one of the 
species imprudently chosen is not to swamp and overgrow its 
neighbour. Yet even here it is possible to be too cautious—some 
alpines will stand a surprisingly high strain of rivalry, as any one 
will know who has seen radiant carpets of Gentiana verna in 
meadows that in two months’ time will be a dense hayfield two 
feet deep, with the Gentian maturing its seed in deep drought, 
far down beneath the close forest of stems that roof it in. But 
note, the overgrowing must only come with the maturing period 
of the germ; in flower, the Gentian would not tolerate such a 
hberty. 
From yet another point of view, too, the natural interwoven 
carpet is wanted. For what can be uglier and less harmonious 
than the large unbroken stretches in which you sometimes see 
alpines laid out, each species in a broad irregular space to 
itself, with each plant inserted at a neat distance from the next, 
quite regularly, like bedded-out stocks, and with the bare ground 
between picked sedulously clean of weeds, and raked as tidy as a 
tablecloth ? This is nothing more than the despised carpet 
bedding of our ancestors, only with Saxifrage and Alyssum 
instead of Alternanthera and Perilla, and with the slabs of colour 
laid down in deliberately irregular and shapeless blotches’ mstead 
of regular lines and rings. 
xlvili 
