PART L] CULTURAL 3 



earth is often of great depth, and if it be not all earth in the 

 common sense of the word, it is more suitable to rock plants 

 than what we commonly understand by that term. Stones of 

 all sizes broken up with the soil, sand, and grit, greatly tend to 

 prevent evaporation. The roots lap round them and follow 

 them deeply down while in such positions, they never suffer 

 from want of food and moisture, or weather. Stone is a 

 great preventive of evaporation, and shattered stone forms the 

 soil of the mountain flanks where the rarest alpine plants 

 abound, while the degradation of gritty soil, so continually 

 effected by melted snow water and heavy rains in summer, 

 serves to earth up, so to speak, many alpine plants. I have 

 torn up tufts of them, showing the remains of generations of 

 the old plants buried and half buried in the soil beneath their 

 descendants. This would be effected to some extent by the 

 decaying of the plants themselves, but frequently grit and 

 peat are washed down among them ; and, in cases where the 

 washings-down do not come so thickly as to overwhelm the 

 plants, they thrive with unusual vigour. 



Now, if we consider how dry even our English air often 

 becomes in summer, and that no natural positions in our 

 gardens afford such cool rooting-places as those described, the 

 need of giving to alpine plants a soil quite different from what 

 has hitherto been in vogue will be seen. The only good 

 principle generally followed is that of raising the plants above 

 the level of the ground. But this raising of the plants above 

 the level should in all cases be accompanied by the more 

 essential way of giving the plants means of rooting deeply into 

 good and firm soil sandy, gritty, peaty, or mingled with broken 

 stone, as the case may be. 



How not to do this is shown by persons who stuff a little 

 soil into a chink between the stones in a rockery, and insert 

 some small alpine plant in that. There is usually a vacuum 

 between the stones and the soil beneath them, and the first 

 dry week sees the death of the plant that not being usually 

 attributed to the right cause. Precisely the same end would 

 have come of it if the experiment had been tried on some alp 



