INTRODUCTION xxv 



variety of condition and where the plants are all con- 

 tented, in reason, with what they get. Those who 

 are quite ignorant of gardening may think a fine 

 flower border more beautiful than any rockwork, and 

 may wonder why any one should be at so much pains 

 to produce an inferior kind of beauty. In answer to 

 them it must be confessed that rock gardening is a 

 kind of game which makes its own difficulties and 

 gets its own pleasures out of them; yet the rock gar- 

 dener will not admit that it produces an inferior kind 

 of beauty, but rather a beauty more subtle and to be 

 appreciated only by those who love plants and study 

 their ways of growth. Plants, he will say, like all 

 other kinds of life, get a great part of their beauty 

 from their adaption to their surroundings, and the 

 more exactly and narrowly they are adapted to their 

 surroundings the greater that beauty will be; while 

 plants that thrive anywhere can have but little of 

 that kind of beauty. Their good nature makes them 

 lose character. They are like men with whom you can 

 do what you choose useful but uninteresting. Of 

 all plants the higher Alpines are most narrowly adapted 

 to their surroundings; and of all plants they have 

 the most character. Nature seems to have designed 

 them more exactly than other flowers with a more 

 unrelenting pressure of circumstances, so that they 

 have a beauty of proportion not often found in the 

 lowland plants that will adapt their growth to con- 

 ditions so various. There is, we may suppose, an 

 ideal proportion for every plant in all its parts. This 



