ALPINE FLOWERS AND ROCK-GARDENS. 147 



any one idea, but beginning at least with simplicity of effect. Then 

 groups and carpets of rock plants would be easy to form, and their 

 culture would be easier in every way. 



REFUSE BRICK " ROCKERIES." Whoever started the idea of the 

 use of the refuse of the brickyard to form the rock-garden was no friend 

 of the garden, as alpine flowers do not thrive on masses of vitrified 

 brick rubbish. And these brick rubbish horrors are put up with 

 overhanging brows so that a drop of moisture cannot get to the 

 plants, and a dry wind can sweep through them as easily as through 

 a grill. If the practice were confined to cottages near brickfields it 

 would not much astonish us ; but in Dulwich Park several thousand 

 tons of it have been put about under the pretence of making rock- 

 gardens, and also at Waterlow Park, Highgate, which was once a 

 pretty and varied piece of ground. If the County Council waste 

 money in this way, we cannot perhaps wonder so much at the owners 

 of villas doing it, but in any case it is ugly and disgraceful in a 

 garden, though we see it freely used in many large country gardens. No 

 other ignoble materials should be seen in any rock garden, in which 

 even stumps of trees are out of place. With some people any 

 broken-nosed statue or other stony or vitrified rubbish is used in what 

 should be the most beautiful and natural of all gardens the alpine 

 garden. If we have not rock in its natural position, or cannot secure 

 some pieces of natural rock to use even on a small scale, it is far 

 better to grow the rock plants in simple ways, even on the level earth 

 on which many of them thrive. 



It would be well to ask the cost of such a disfigurement in public 

 and large gardens where it is done on as large a scale as this; the 

 mere price of cartage would have made a model rock garden of 

 natural stone. When these villainous banks of brick-yard refuse 

 were first erected, anything more hideous in a public garden was not 

 to be seen, but by piling on them common shrubs, evergreens, 

 Tobacco, Stonecrops, China Asters, Begonias, Chrysanthemums, Beet- 

 root, Heath, Elder, and higgledy-piggledy verdure of this nature, a 

 sort of brick-rubbish salad was the result, and the effect of the brick is 

 less seen. It is not only the ugliness of this in itself that is bad ; it 

 is such an injustice to the gardener, who has to adorn at all seasons 

 such structures, to expect him to get any good results from the kind 

 of thing a Brentford cobbler who happens to live near a brickyard 

 makes a little " rockwork " of in his garden. 



MISPLACED ARTIFICIAL ROCK. Artificial rock is formed now 

 and then in districts where the natural rock is beautiful, as in the 

 country round Tunbridge Wells. Though why anybody should bring 

 the artificial rockmaker into a garden or park where there is already 

 fine natural beautiful rock it is not easy to see. Also, in certain 



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