INTRODUCTION. 
hopeless country for the rock-gardener ; nor is South Africa much 
better, owing to its fierce and ripening summer ; but New Zealand, 
at least from the mountains of the South Island, offers us a number 
of lovely things, as yet mostly untried, that seem to enjoy much 
the same humid alpine conditions as prevail in the ranges of 
Central Japan. As for the Auckland and the Campbell Islands, 
there lurk some coy nymphs of most especial loveliness, which 
from their circumstances and home ought by no means to prove 
impracticable in our gardens. 
I have already advised the really earnest-minded to buy or 
collect their plants in flower. This is not to say that one’s taste 
in alpines develops into a cast-iron florist’s standard, but the 
best alone is good enough for the gardener, and almost all plants 
show some variation into finer and less fine forms. This rule has 
hardly an exception : a type is never rigid as a railway line, and in 
a hundred of its representatives will surely be found a percentage 
of exceptions to the rule in amplitude of petal, size or colour 
of flower, or shortness of stem. Even a botanical and fixed 
diagnostic may vary in degree ; and a species distinct by a hairy 
leaf may, in some specimens, have more or less hairmess than the 
description indicates. But it must be noted that while a botanical 
type is combined from the presence in greater or less degree of a 
certain number of invariable characteristics, no specific difference 
can ever be built on any one irrelevant and personal variation, 
such as large flower, or difference of colour. At the same time, 
though all these picked forms are nothing more than varieties, 
the gardener has the satisfaction of knowing them quite con- 
stant. A true albino is always an albino, a vivid-coloured 
development never loses its fire, and from a big-blossomed clump 
will never spring a flower of inferior design. Therefore I lay stress 
yet again on the necessity of selecting your plants in flower ; 
there must be no uniform standard of perfection, yet in beauty 
there are always many and diverse degrees. A typical case 
in point is that of Dianthus neglectus. This is always beauti- 
ful indeed, but the type has an inclination to be a trifle 
lanky in the leg, and starry in the petal; whereas one day 
lii 
