ALPINE PLANTS FOR ROCK GARDENS 23 



a little soil sprinkled on top of them makes them less conspicuous. 

 When our object is achieved and we have collected enough of the 

 best plants, there will be no bare, stony places to offend our eyes. 

 Here is one approach to the rock garden. Nothing in the least 

 formal, and low plants are better than high ones. These forget- 

 me-nots were glorious, because just beyond them, looking black in 

 the photograph, was a solid mass of that wonderful hardy wall- 

 flower, Erysimum allioni. As far as I have been able to discover, 

 there is only one shade of it, a deep rich yellow. It is biennial 

 and grows about a foot high. Here are more forget-me-nots. 

 These are with lilies-of-the-valley, and the whole plantation is 

 surrounded with periwinkle. In the periwinkle we plant that 

 typical alpine, the autumn crocus. I have often smiled as I read 

 about its charms for the rock garden and wondered what these 

 good authors thought of their autumn crocus in May, when it's 

 great coarse leaves appear. By growing them in the periwinkle 

 we are able to hide these leaves as soon as they show signs of drying. 

 We roll them up and hide them under the periwinkle, and there 

 they can dry up without being an eyesore. Here are the crocuses 

 in September. 



Visitors, seeing a rock garden for the first time full of blooming 

 alpines, are constantly exclaiming, "These cannot be hardy plants! 

 They are too delicate, too brilliant to have lived all through our 

 icy winters." These Saxifraga cordifoUa were particularly brilliant 

 last April, a vivid coral pink, and you can see in this picture that 

 there were no leaves on the trees when they bloomed. 



Here is another alpine beauty, a Primula denticulata cashmeriana. 

 It sows itself, and, given half shade and water during dry weather, 

 it is perfectly easy to grow. 



The old-fashioned way of having gardens bare in the early spring, 

 except for narcissus and tulips, has resulted in their being accepted 

 so, as a natural law, and when people hear of twenty or thirty 

 varieties being in bloom in early April they are amazed. 



Alpine plants usually bloom in the early spring. In the moun- 

 tains the summers are very short; often only a few weeks from the 

 time when the snow melts to the first storms of autumn, so the 

 flowers must appear immediately, if they are to ripen seed and 

 continue their species. There are summer-blooming alpines like 



