My Garden in Spring 



Both are attractive so early in the year, but the two I like 

 best are C. luteum, the only yellow one of the family, and 

 C. crociflorum, a charming, little white flower with purple 

 lines running up the back of each segment, a very good 

 imitation of a small Crocus. They have existed for some 

 years in the rock garden in ordinary soil, but I believe the 

 sand moraine with underground waterpipe would suit them 

 best. It certainly agrees with their wilful cousin Bulbocodium 

 vernum, a plant I could never induce to settle down and be 

 cosy until I indulged myself in the luxury of what, for 

 want of a better name, I call a sand moraine. 



As I suppose it is inevitable that I write of my moraines, 

 we might as well discuss the subject here. No one would 

 read a gardening book nowadays that did not deal with 

 this latest fashion in gardening. The name and popularity 

 and prattle of the thing are new, but many good cultiva- 

 tors had their porous, gritty, raised or sunk beds for alpines, 

 whatever they called them, long ago. Mr. Wolley-Dod 

 laughingly called his narrow raised mounds "potato-ridges." 

 But they proved the ideal home for many difficult plants 

 that would not exist domiciled otherwise on the cold, sticky 

 clay at Edge Hall. The ridges were, as I remember them, 

 about twenty yards long, and mainly composed of grit and 

 leaf soil, and ever full of rare and healthy plants. The 

 ridge system was the important factor of success at Edge, 

 but in the hungry, arid, gravel soil at Cambridge, Mr. Lynch 

 found a sunk bed of gritty soil made a happy home for 

 Saxifrages that repined and went into a decline under other 

 treatment. Then arose the prophet. The abundant rain- 

 fall of Ingleborough and the local limestone (three or four 

 lumps of which make any sort of rock gardening a thing 

 104 



