GENERAL INTRODUCTION 24! 



helpful, for it allows the geographical and geological dis- 

 tribution of the plants to be grasped at once. 



A series of several distinct rockeries, each with a char- 

 acter of its own, is far superior to one gigantesque 

 creation ; the effect is more pleasing to the eye in other 

 words, is more natural and the plants will live in better 

 health and comfort. The enormous erections, with which 

 we are familiar, "a la Mont-Blanc*' (as they have been 

 called), are not really picturesque in any sense, and have 

 several very real disadvantages. A system of little struc- 

 tures, scattered over a slope or among turf, has every- 

 thing in its favour. Once, I admit, it was long ago I 

 built a Cyclopaean chaos of stone in my alpine garden on 

 the Dancet road, and very quickly recognised that such 

 huddledoms have neither artistic merit nor practical util- 

 ity. To seek to copy nature more and more, closer and 

 closer that is the final confession of my faith. 



A chapter is given to this subject in an earlier book of 

 mine, Les Plantes des Jllpes (1884). The many flattering 

 notices, which 1 then received, have urged me to con- 

 tinue in the same path, nor have 1 ever wandered from it. 

 In a later work (1889), a monograph on Hardy Ferns, 

 the beauty of natural gardens is again emphasised (see 

 chapter XII : " Ferns in the wild Garden"). 1 mention 

 this, however, not to claim such ideas as my own ; for 

 my sole merit is to have adopted them from my mother 

 and from English artists, my fellow-disciples of the great 

 aesthetic teacher Ruskin. 



Twenty years ago this style was a common laughing- 

 stock. Since then it has been taken into favour and we 

 have seen landscape gardening, which in France, Swit- 

 zerland and elsewhere had remained sunk in muddy tra- 

 ditions that England had rejected for more than a hundred 

 years, make immense strides in fact, entirely revolu- 

 tionised. Our most accomplished craftsmen have at last 



