INTRODUCTION xxiii 



they will at any rate serve as a frame not incongruous 

 to the beauty of his Alpine flowers. And his pleasure 

 in rock gardening is enhanced by the fact that the 

 nearer he gets to a natural arrangement of his rocks 

 the more likely are his plants to thrive among them. 

 This kind of natural arrangement is not easy to 

 contrive, and will never come by chance. When peo- 

 ple first began to make rockeries they seem to have 

 had some dim idea of imitating chaos. They bought 

 loads of clinkers, certainly the most chaotic objects 

 ever produced either by nature or art, and they shot 

 them down in confused heaps in parts of the garden 

 most unfavourable to plant life. Among these heaps 

 they planted Ferns and Stonecrops and London 

 pride. Some of these perhaps contrived to live, and 

 did in time conceal some of the desolation of the 

 clinkers; but their survival was a credit to them- 

 selves rather than to those who put them there. When, 

 however, rockeries first began to be thought of as 

 places for the cultivation of rock plants, there was a 

 violent reaction from this imitation of chaos. Every 

 plant was provided with a square enclosure of stones 

 and a large zinc label, so that even if the plant died, 

 which it often did, it might not lack a monument. 

 This was formal gardening reduced to an absurdity; 

 and those who really loved the beauty of Alpine plants 

 and were eager to grow them soon began to see that 

 the mere proximity of a rock would not cure an Al- 

 pine plant of its home sickness. They set to work to 

 discover what benefit the plant got from its native 



