66 ROCK GARDENING 



However, all are agreed that Sir Frank's alpine flowers are grown 

 with admirable skill and regard for colour harmony. The accom- 

 panying photographs well illustrate the style of rock gardening one 

 sees everywhere in England, viz., the culture of alpine flowers in the 

 pockets of a " rockery," which is a complicated structure, put to- 

 gether in such a way as to give many kinds of rock, soil, and expos- 

 ure. What England can teach us about this style of gardening I 

 have tried to elaborate in Chapter XX. It is a grander theme to 

 which I now invite your attention. For the best rockery in the 

 world is obviously the work of man, while the finest floral pictures 

 we can paint are those which seem to be the work of nature, e. g., 

 the cascade of pinks on plate 30. 



The kind of rock gardening that offers the most brilliant pos- 

 sibilities to owners of American estates is the painting of great land- 

 scapes on land that is naturally rocky. If you have motored over 

 the Downs amid ten-acre splotches of scarlet made by the wild pop- 

 pies in the grain fields; if you have coached through the Lake 

 Country when miles of heather were in bloom; if you have rested 

 your eyes during a hot summer noon on a cool expanse of ferns 

 clothing a beetling cliif; if you have felt the centuries look down 

 upon you from castle or cathedral ruins crowned with great col- 

 onies of snapdragon or red valerian; or if you have gazed upward 

 at the harebells and rowan waving above a cascade in the Scotch 

 Highlands, you will know what I mean. 



Amidst such beauty my heart sank when I remembered the 

 advertisements painted on conspicuous rocks in America. (How 

 soon shall we have laws that make it a criminal offence to ruin a 

 landscape in this way?) And I thought of the fortunes spent at 

 Newport and in Connecticut in blasting out rocks and burying 

 them in order to make lawns amid some of the wildest and most 



