My Garden in Spring 



that I believed were impossible, in health and vigour and 

 jostling each other in his piped beds, and we must look to 

 him for light and guidance. Mr. Malby has experimented 

 on a smaller scale with beds with impervious floors and an 

 inlet above and outlet below, and has found them very 

 successful. 



Of course I was an early victim of the moraine 

 measles after my first visit to Ingleborough, and when 

 next the Moraine Magician came to see me, he helped in 

 planning my first attempt at a granite chip one. My 

 previous experiments had not been over successful; a 

 range of the rock garden had been built with the debris 

 of broken Welsh slate, the result of the re-roofing of my 

 brother's house, but I and the plants find it rather 

 uninteresting too dry and lean, like a diet of cracknel 

 biscuits or pulled bread. Another mound composed of 

 old ceilings, brick rubble, cinders, and gravel exactly suits 

 my outdoor Cactuses and other succulents, of which more 

 anon. A sloping pocket of the slate-roof range was 

 cleared out and filled to the depth of two and a half feet 

 with granite chips, smaller in gauge than Mr. Farrer 

 usually advises to meet any arid climate half-way, and 

 mixed with leaf soil it has suited some plants admirably, 

 but contrary to all my hopes needs watering morning 

 and evening in dry weather, and so is not much better in 

 labour saving than any ordinary bank of the rock garden. 

 In it Androsace hedraeantha is happy and seeds about ; 

 Cerastium alpinum, var. lanatum, which refused to live with 

 me before, now wishes to fill this bed. Edraianthus 

 species have ceased to be an anxiety, and give me pleasure 

 and flowers. Saponaria lutea is as happy as the proverbial 

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