94 ALPINE FLOWERS [PART I. 



perish from this cause. The right way, after preparing the 

 ground, is to make it firm and level, and then make a little 

 cut or trench. The side of this trench should be firm and 



1 Right 2. Wrong. 



smooth, and the plant placed against it, the roots spread out, 

 and the neck of the plant set just at the proper level, as in 

 fig. 1. Then the fine earth of the little trench is to be thrown 

 against the roots, and as much side pressure applied as may be 

 necessary to make the whole quite firm. In this way not a 

 fibre of the most fragile plant need be injured 



THINGS TO AVOID. 



It is essential to keep clear of the UGLY, unhappily strewn 

 too freely about the garden world. In man's attempt at rock- 

 gardening, many hideous things have been made even in public 

 gardens, and illustrations of them printed for our guidance in 

 books. Even now, in the public gardens of London, the most 

 hideous and wasteful things are done in the shape of ignoble 

 masses of spoiled brick, as in "Waterlow and Dulwich Parks. 

 It is brickyard waste, valueless for any purpose save a bottom 

 for roads, and its use in public gardens is hardly to be explained, 

 except as jobbery or gross ignorance. The mere cost of carting 

 it to Dulwich Park, if rightly applied, might have given us a 

 true rock-garden, formed of some of the natural sandstone, found 

 south of London, that might have been a lesson in beauty. We 

 have not only to avoid these brutalities in material because of 

 their ugliness, or of their bad effect on our plants, but because 

 every cobbler who rushes from his last to write a book on 

 garden design will assume that the ugly way is the only way, 

 and so do his little best against truth and beauty. 



