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The American Flower Garden 



beauty have been wasted in blasting and burying rocks on estates 

 in Connecticut alone in order to make "gentlemen's country seats" 

 conform with conventional methods of treatment elsewhere. Let 

 no one deplore the possession of boulders, outcropping rocks, 

 rocky seams, crevices, and ledges, for the trained imagination of 

 a landscape gardener should find infinite possibilities of beautifying 

 them at a fraction of the cost of reducing the land to a level common- 

 place. The opportunity to preserve the land's individuality, no 

 true lover of nature or of gardening will neglect. One of the most 

 beautiful estates in this country includes an abandoned stone 

 quarry, now transformed by the subtle and sympathetic art of 

 the gardener into the happy home of myriads of rock-loving 

 plants. Your true gardener never spoils nature: he trains and 

 develops her. 



Since the situation of any kind of a garden should dominate 

 the whole scheme of its development, few hard and fast rules for 

 the making of a rock garden can be laid down. However, it is 

 certain that the site needs to be selected with extra care, for most 

 of the failures to grow alpines and other rock-loving plants in this 

 country have resulted from attempting to copy the rockeries of 

 England instead of adapting them to our drier, more sunny and 

 more extremely hot and cold climate. But at last we have learned 

 that rocks not screened from the sun by trees, or so situated on a 

 northern slope that only the weaker rays of morning or afternoon 

 sunshine slant upon them, are more likely to scorch or scald plants 

 than to aid their growth. We may not attempt to naturalise in 

 exposed and sunny situations around our homes those charming 

 little cushions, rosettes, tufts and creeping plants from the cooler 

 mountains above the timber line, where moisture-laden clouds and 

 mists almost always envelop them. Nor will alpine plants, however 





