GROUND, ROC K, WATER 145 



debris has been worn down all around them and they stand above a 

 more or less level surface. Such compositions are often very beautiful, 

 but they are usually ineffective when imitated in a small inclosed space, 

 and they commonly give scant opportunity for the growth of rock- 

 loving plants. 



Bowlders are more frequently found as parts of the banks of ponds 

 or larger bodies of water : in places, that is, where the surrounding softer 

 material has been cut away from one side by the waves, and the rocks, 

 large and small, lie where the interaction of water wash and gravita- 

 tion has left them. Such a bowlder bank and beach may be imitated 

 on the shore of a pond, natural or naturalistic, and if in scale with the 

 pond it may well add a considerable element of verisimilitude to an 

 artificial water-body, but except as a shore such a bank would be 

 unnatural. 



Bowlders also may form important elements in a scene where they 

 have been laid bare by the action of a flowing stream. The stream 

 valley, as well as the pond-basin, is a good landscape character for the 

 designer to imitate, since its shape makes it a composition enframed 

 and apart from the rest of the landscape. (See Drawing XVHI, opp. 

 p. 146.) When rocks are used as a part of the valley side, they will nor- 

 mally form the projecting, steeper, and dominant parts of the banks, 

 and so assume importance in the composition. 



Rock appears also in the landscape as outcropping ledges of natural Ledges 

 stone. Sometimes it has evidently been exposed by some of the forces 

 which we have discussed ; sometimes, lying at steep slopes or at high 

 altitudes, in cliffs or mountain summits, it has apparently never been 

 clothed by any softer covering, at least not in recent geologic times. 

 Such rock ledges, subjected to the action of the weather and in a great 

 part of the world to frost, will in time break up on their surface into 

 separate rocks. If the slope is not too great, these rocks will still re- 

 main more or less in their original position, and by their related forms 

 and the direction of their fissures and perhaps their stratification, show 

 the character of their parent ledge. Groups of rocks so formed are 

 likely to produce, in nature, particularly unified and interesting com- 

 positions. They offer also very suitable abiding places for rock-loving 

 plants, since the fissures among them may be deep, and all the loam 



