4 ROGK GARDENING FOR AMATEURS 



The love of building is inherent in all of us, and the 

 average amateur who has hitherto grown his flowers on 

 the flat, finds, when once he has made a start, that he 

 gets as much real fun out of it as the babies building 

 castles on the sands. If his attitude towards gardening 

 is a proper one, even the preparation of a rose bed or 

 mixed border is capable of giving pleasure to the digger, 

 but this is as nothing to the fierce joy that possesses the 

 rock gardener. Slowly, surely, and with a subtleness 

 that fascinates, the work of his own creation grows under 

 his eyes ; there is something substantial to show for his 

 labour, and he experiences the satisfaction that follows 

 " something attempted, something done." It is, I think, 

 true that building a rock garden is so absorbing because 

 one is following an ideal set by Nature ; here rises a peak 

 or dips a hollow, here frowns some miniature promontory 

 or rises sheer some Liliputian precipice. There gapes 

 a chasm or lies some stony slope or exquisite alpine 

 meadow. It is all so delightfully imitative that in ideal- 

 istic moments it is easy to imagine one's garden of rocks 

 and flowers peopled by mountain elves. The prosaic 

 methods that are followed in preparing borders on the 

 flat have no such effect on the imagination ; they leave 

 one, in comparison, mentally cold, if bodily warm. He 

 who builds well and truly has created a little flower 

 world of his own ; he has it may be in some small 

 suburban plot, dull, flat and enclosed raised a fair 

 model of a mountain range, and peopled the peaks and 

 crannies and crevices with their own inimitable flowers. 



