INTRODUCTION. 
upon the high lawns of its alps it will yield you a dozen 
special forms pre-eminent in different ways—especially free and 
unanimous in bloom, perhaps, or massed in a compact and nearly 
stemless clump of colour, or blazing with a special incandescence 
of pink, or notably round and solid and comely in the amplified 
flower. And all these will “to their own selves prove true” in 
the garden for evermore, so that the eye of discernment is indeed 
necessary to their selection. For the average nurseryman cannot 
be expected to go out and make a choice among the living plants ; 
he commissions a Continental collector to send him so many 
hundreds of Dianthus neglectus, and the collector, anxious only to 
make up his quantity without regard to quality, simply goes up in 
August and rakes out at haphazard all the clumps he comes across, 
until the required number is fulfilled. Most of these, then, will be 
more or less typical, but there will also, with luck, be a certain 
number of variations for the better (and also for the worse); the 
enthusiast who is unable to go and make his own choice on the 
wild hills will do well, therefore, to see that collected stock in flower 
next year, that he may be sure of getting its most beautiful forms. 
More nonsense is talked about collecting alpines, perhaps, 
than about any other subject in the garden. Even about 
myself, I have been told, are spread a number of legends, always 
ignorant, and occasionally malicious. Those who love and know 
the flowers of the alps as only those of long and arduous experi- 
ence can hope to do,—those, of all people, are not to be accused 
of “devastating” the ranges and exterminating rare plants. 
Such an accusation can only be brought by envy or ignorance. 
For there is no such thing in the Alps as a “rare” plant ; there 
are many plants, indeed, that are extremely rare in distribution, 
and it is this sense of the word that has misled the uninformed. 
But when once the distribution of a “rare ” plant is reached, it 
will there be found in such abundant millions that not all the 
collectors of the world (and there are perhaps ten serious ones now 
on earth) could make any mark upon its meadows in ten hundred 
years. Very “rare,” for instance, is Primula spectabilis ; yet, in 
its own tiny territory, all the hill-tops are crested for miles with 
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