NOTING OF NATURAL CONDITIONS 29 



eye to their effect, but also as to the relative 

 amounts of moisture they can stand. One is then 

 able to supplement the natural downfall on a 

 particular set of plants that are lovers of damp, 

 without at the same time deluging those to which 

 an excess of moisture would be prejudicial. We 

 cannot successfully grow anything whatever except 

 by approximating our arrangements as nearly as 

 possible to its natural conditions, and reproducing, 

 as far as may be, its habitat, whether it be a plant 

 like the heather, rejoicing in the open sunlight ; the 

 herb-paris sheltering itself amidst other vegetation ; 

 or the moneywort, delighting in a humid situation. 

 Questions of soil are no less important. It is rather 

 a common fallacy to suppose that because the silver- 

 weed, for example, grows luxuriantly under the hard 

 conditions of the dusty roadside it will prosper ten 

 times better if we transplant it into what we con- 

 sider soil ten times as good. Under such conditions 

 plants either ramble so grossly as to lose their typical 

 character, 1 or, more frequently, decline to grow at 



1 A brother enthusiast told us that when he first reared 

 edelweiss from seed the result was a great disappointment 

 to him, as the plants grew up considerably over a foot high, 

 flowering but little, and it was only by considerably hardening 

 the conditions that he was able to get anything like the 

 typical plant that had charmed him on the mountain-side. 

 We recall an instance again where a lady, desirous of growing 

 a hyacinth particularly well, fed it so liberally with some 

 one's wonderful fertiliser, that it threw up leaves of utterly 



