12 ALPINE FLOWERS AND ROCK GARDENS. 



Their growth in popular favour has also been helped 

 by the ever increasing love of travel, more especially 

 amongst the mountains of Switzerland, and it is 

 natural that those who have beheld the wealth of 

 colour in the early summer on the high pastures of 

 the Alps, should seek to have representatives of these 

 beautiful flowers in their gardens. Hence it is that 

 the claim of a rock garden consists not only in the 

 variety and rich colouring of its flowers, but in the 

 associations connected with the plants, and the 

 memories they recall. 



The enthusiastic rock gardener, it is safe to say, is 

 generally one who has made the acquaintance of some 

 of his favourites in their native haunts ; and the sight 

 of them as they come into bloom arouses memories of 

 the day amongst the mountains when he saw them 

 for the first time in all the glory of their wild beauty. 

 For instance, in the writer's own small rock and bog 

 garden, the purple Saxifrage recalls the day when he 

 saw it growing amongst the boulders by the path over 

 the Col de Torrent, in clumps eighteen inches square, 

 one glowing mass of lovely purple bells. The Gentian 

 brings to mind a day's tramp over Yorkshire fells, 

 where it peered forth on the grassy hill-tops on which 

 golden plovers were nesting. The mossy Campion 

 carries one's thoughts to the crags above a mountain 

 tarn in the Lake District, where it grew in luxuriant 

 cushions of green, profusely studded with rosy blooms. 

 The Birds' -eye Primrose, in the bog, has a score or 

 more of associations, chief amongst them being an 

 Alpine pasture near Piora, where it made a long bed 



