78 THE NEW GARDENING 



Odds and ends of travel talk, and a six-days' " personally 

 conducted " tour, transform many a hitherto harmless 

 person into a fierce and uncompromising Alpine gardener, 

 whose property forthwith breaks into an eruption of 

 mounds and rocks, which can never by any possibility 

 form a suitable home for plants. 



The first essential to successful Alpine gardening is 

 to study Alpine flowers, not to build huge rockeries. 

 If it be urged that rock plants cannot be studied without 

 rocks, the reply is that lessons can be learned as thoroughly, 

 and at a quarter the cost, by bedding small stones in 

 a natural bank, laying rough steps by water, setting 

 a few small pieces in a gully or dell, taking advantage 

 of falling ground near a stream, and making plain rock- 

 beds, as by spending large sums on a made rockery with 

 great artificial mounds, deep excavated water-courses 

 and monstrous imported stones. 



A few of the peculiarities of Alpine plants might be 

 stated briefly as follows : 



(1) They like, or they do not like, sun. 



(2) They like, or they do not like, shade. 



(3) They like loamy soil. 



(4) They like peaty soil. 



(5) They dislike overhead moisture. 



(6) They will, or they will not, thrive in dry places. 



(7) They like, or they do not like, boggy ground. 



It is not by beginning an apprenticeship in Alpine 

 gardening with the construction of a large rockery that 

 these and other traits of Alpines can be learned. 



The new rock gardening places plantsmanship first. 

 It dictates that the root of the matter shall not be am- 

 bitious schemes for reproducing in miniature the land- 



