156 WALL AND WATER GARDENS 



would have to be undertaken for an edge-destroying 

 walling. 



It was a good day for our water margins when the 

 Giant Gunneras were introduced ; for the immense 

 size and noble form of their foliage enables us to 

 make water-pictures on a scale that before was im- 

 possible. They are well seen across some little 

 breadth of water like the narrow pool at that wonder- 

 ful half-wild garden at Wisley ; but one would like to 

 grow them in several other ways, one of them being 

 on the banks of some stream that passes down a 

 narrow valley with a wide and shallow stream-way 

 strewn with great grey boulders. 



The Gunneras are so overpoweringly large that 

 they dwarf everything near them ; their size seems 

 to demand some association with primeval rock-form 

 and evidence of primeval force. Alone among such 

 rocks, and in a valley or mountain hollow whose 

 sides are clothed with dense darkness of Firs, one 

 can imagine these great plants looking their noblest. 



In that same good garden at Wisley, now the garden 

 of the Royal Horticultural Society, the beautiful 

 Japanese Iris Icevigata or /. K&mpferi grows by the 

 thousand in the flowering grassy banks by the 

 narrow water opposite the Gunneras, by the edges of 

 other ponds, and in a meadow-like space of several 

 acres. In all these and other such places this good 

 plant is doing well. It is certainly the Water Iris 

 above all others. 



I have often found that among lovers of flowers of 

 the less careful order, there is a general idea that all 



