May 25, 1912.] 



THE GARDENERS CHRONICLE 



355 



DEVELOPMENT IN ROCK GARDENS SINGE 





THE LAST "INTERNATIONAL 



ff 



No western nation, it can fairly be said, has 

 taken a more personal and persistent interest 

 in flowers than the English. But together with 

 this personal interest there joins, unfortunately, 



the typical British blindness to all the beauties on the whole 



• ■ m m ^ I'll ' * 



an art upon them. The very word " rockwork " 

 still surviving (" rocaille ") shows that if you 

 indulged in the thing at all, it was as an exotic 

 freak, a misinterpreted memory at third or 

 fourth hand from the great traditions of the 

 Ming and Manchu Emperors half a world away. 

 In all early notes on rock plants the feeling 

 is clearly one of a pitying wonder that things 



of constructive art, with the consequence that, 



while the culture of Alpines in England has a 



long and august pedigree, the art of the rock 



garden has hardly even yet begun to exist. As 



to history, it has none. 



Therefore, in any historical retrospect, it is 



fair to separate the two subjects, and to take a " Heu loca felici non adeunda viro !" — Stony, 



steep, untidy, stormy, dreadful are the mountains 

 — call no man happy who has to tread them. 

 And what a distance have we trodden, indeed, 

 from those times to our own, when an increas- 



pretty should voluntarily 

 choose to inhabit places so preposterous and dis- 

 orderly. In one of the earliest, that of Linnaeus, 

 Alpines are hedged about with a sort of super- 

 stitious horror. Little attention is paid to their 

 cultivation, which is held to be almost impossi- 

 ble, and the hills on which they dwell, are 



rather larger purview than that of 60 years, 

 6ince thus it may be possible to make some 

 guess at this radical separation between the 

 growing of mountain plants and the craft of 

 designing mountains on which to grow them. 

 The two arts run, and have always run, in 

 different currents, and so profound is the breach 

 between them that even to this day it is not 

 wholly obliterated. 



The cultivation, enthusiastic and successful, 

 of mountain plants dates back, indeed, to the 

 gorgeous tyranny of the Tudors; the pages of 

 Parkinson, in early Stuart days, may well 

 humiliate the ambitious cultivator of our own 

 time, who cherishes perfectly vain hopes of 

 prodding the Floral Committee into wakefulness 

 toward some believed novelty from "Alpine 

 mountains cold." But all these treasures were, 

 it seems, grown in borders or pots with deep 

 suspicion. Of any natural setting there was no 

 idea. And when, at last, the first notion of rock- 

 work construction dawned upon the West, it 

 came from a source and in a fashion that not 

 only did not suggest any connection with 

 European Alpines, but even seemed to preclude 

 the use of them ; and thus arose the disastrous 

 separation of ideas. 



For it was not till the close of the 17th century 

 that the influence of China and Japan was set 

 fairly flowing into the West; and even then it 

 came through the utilitarian and unimaginative 

 channel of the Dutch, conveying to us pots and 

 pans and furniture, indeed : flooding the cabinets 

 of Mary II ? and threatening grotesqueries to 

 upset the staid gardens of King William, but 

 wholly divorced from the deep wisdom, the 

 foundations of sense and harmony and reason 

 that underlie the gardening code of China and 

 Japan, and result, accordingly, in creations un- 

 surpassable by man — the supreme and unques- 

 tionable perfection of gardening. None of these 

 ideas was brought to us then ; nor could we 

 have understood them if they had been. Pagodas 

 arrived, though, but without their reason ; and 

 without their reason also reminiscences of that 

 wild Dolomitic scenery of Omi, which lives im- 

 mortal as our notion of Chinese landscape, and 

 as the motive in Japanese painting of the far-off 

 Ashikaga Period. And thus our first concep- 

 tion of rockwork began at the wrong end, in 

 weird and tortured agglomerations of pinnacles. 

 These, on the one hand, had not the motive and 

 meaning that they have in the East; and, on 

 the other, gave the Western folk, very naturally, 

 no idea of using them in connection with moun- 

 tain plants. These hurtful horrors had their day 

 and passed, but their influence held long, and 

 still is not wholly dead. The average idea of a 

 rockwork is too often traceable, in its efflores- 

 cence of spikes, to that remote tradition of a 

 misunderstood ideal from the East. 



We aje now approaching modern times. All 

 this while, no doubt, to a greater or less degree, 

 the cultivation of Alpines continued, and 

 primula x pubescens persistentlv poured the 

 bewildering multitude of its offspring upon an 

 adoring world— all under the name of Auricula, 

 ^ut the sacred fire languished; knowledge of 

 Alpines grew, indeed, but the idea of cultivating 

 them was tainted by the typical 18th century 



h7 J il the places where the y g row - People 

 ated the mountains, and had no wish to build 



ing number of respectable people finds increasing 

 happiness upon the bland and flower-bedecked 



slopes of Baldo or the Mont Cenis. 

 Linnaeus and his time all this 

 horror. 



But to 



stark 



joy was 

 Even England contained such monsters 

 of discomfort; was there not, in " Jorckshire, 

 Ingleborugh "? 



How has the change arisen? Is it possible 

 that the leaven of China had long been working 

 upon our Northern temperament, and leaped at 

 last into efficiency by opening to us the 

 psychological value of asymmetry, solitude, and 

 the ever-changing hills? Be this as it may, 

 the early years of last century, the re-modelling 

 of Europe, up to the time of the Queen's mar- 

 riage, were marked by a great romantic anti- 

 formal movement which has its best monument 

 in the character and words of Marianne Dash- 

 wood, precisely anticipating the character and 

 words of the later Ruskinian revival and re- 



action 



against a no 



less dead and far more 



deadening tradition. But, unfortunately, Alpines 

 had almost passed out of knowledge by the time 

 of the 'thirties. An enquirer, in 1835, asks in 

 Harrison's Cabinet for names of plants to put 

 on a "rockwork" (ominous Vord !). He gets in 

 reply a sad and jejune little list of common 

 things. It contains three Saxifrages only, and 

 these are granulata, hypnoides, and oppositi- 

 folia. Of the Euaeizoons, not one word or hint, 

 though Wooster gives 1731 as the introduction 

 date of S. Aizoon — a date, if it were true, that 

 deserves to stand rather higher than that of the 

 landing of Columbus, so far as the general happi- 

 ness of the human race is concerned. But the 

 date is not true: Parkinson knows Aizoon as 

 well, or better, than any nurseryman of to-day. 

 Imagination staggers dazed through the Sahara 

 of the mid-Victorian period. If the possibilities of 

 man hold anything more dreadful, let us never 

 be called to endure it. Tn England Alpines were 

 more and more cultivated, and this is how—in 

 a round mound consisting of close, successive 

 rings of Sedum and Saxifrage, with a Yucca 

 or some commanding feature at the top. The 

 description is Verlot's, and he justly adds that 

 the effect is nothing if not ungraceful. But he, 

 and others, were at work ; the horror of the hills 

 had passed away for ever, c Alps were become 

 happy playgrounds in the revulsion to naturalism 

 that followed on the crash of the great revolu- 

 tions. And the movement instantly brought a 

 developing zeal for the mountain plants, and a 

 quickly-growing knowledge of their real per- 

 sonalities. Wooster and Verlot began diffusing 

 knowledge, and English gardeners, never to be 

 wholly crushed by fashion, took eagerly again to 



But to us who read 



is something 

 tone. Fear, 



the cultivation of Alpines. 

 of their labours to-day, 



about 



there 



their 



pathetically comic 

 intense fear, is the note of what they have to say. 

 They look on Alpines with an eye of trembling 

 suspicion; it is " possible " that Saxifraga longi- 

 folia may prove hardy, and their other cultural 

 recommendations are in the same mournful key. 

 Very, very few, according to Verlot, are the 

 Alpines that can be grown in the open ; the only 

 two undoubted successes being Gentiana acaulis 



mens, because so much 



and Arabis albida. For the rest, pots, and 

 special mixtures, and frames and fusses beyond 

 end were considered to be absolutely essential. 

 Wooster is not quite so lugubrious as this, but 

 even he approaches the culture of rock plants 

 always from the point of view that they are 

 only safe in pots. Can one wonder that gar- 

 deners shrank away in affright, and that there 

 came a vast slump in the cultivation of Alpines 



though, thanks to this very misapprehen- 

 sion, they were probably more scientific and 

 more successful cultivators of individual speci- 



more frightened and 

 fussy than we are to-day in our calm knowledge 

 that most things can be grown quite well with a 

 reasonable degree of care in fundamentals? And 

 all this while "labyrinths" (whatever they may 

 have been) and " rockworks M and monstrous 

 cascades went on being built without, appar- 

 ently, anybody's ever conceiving that they could 

 be used to make Alpines happy, or Alpines to 

 make them beautiful. Verlot has a plate of a 

 waterfall at the Buttes Chaumont (with two 

 ladies in the foreground, indistinguishable to all 

 but the minutest inspection from t"he rockwork 

 they are adorning) which almost attains the 

 pinnacle of conceivable ugliness. My own great- 

 grandfather made a "grotto" at Ingleborough, 

 and beset it w T ith spikes, and planted things of 

 which a list remains. But it is the only thing of 

 them that does. There w r as no connection yet 

 between M rockwork " and rock plants. 



The man w T ho made that connection is, I sup- 

 pose, Mr. Robinson. It is unnecessary to enlarge 

 upon his services, and presumptuous to praise 

 them. For evermore we have the rock garden 

 made for its plants, and for evermore established 

 is the certainty that eight out of ten Alpines are 

 easier, hardier, heartier, less exacting, and far 

 more repaying in any decent conditions of cul- 

 ture than all the gaudy annuals put together on 

 which the Victorians expended their zeal 

 and money. But we have not yet quite 

 attained perfection. We all grow Alpines easily, 

 and love them, and have rock-gardens in 

 which we grow our plants, with much less 

 care and much greater success than our timid 

 and laborious predecessors, who killed their cats 

 with kindness. We have other methods. But 

 we have now too utterly forgotten the art of 

 China. There is no scheme, unity or care about 

 the artistic aspect of the "rockwork" itself; 

 and I use that word advisedly. It stands for a 

 good thing, if rightly understood. We do not 

 only want a rockwork ; but on the other hand 

 we do not only want a series of mounded dogs' 

 graves without design, on which to grow our 

 Eritrichium, no matter how blazingly. It is 

 our fate to rush at extremes ; rock and no plants, 

 or plants and no schemed rock. Our aim must 

 certainly now be the growing of plants as well 

 as we can; but we must lend far more of our 

 taste and energy towards also making a " work " 

 of our M rock " — a work of art, simple, apt and 

 harmonious in its place, as the immemorial gar- 

 den-craft of China can teach those who wish to 

 learn. At present there is a veritable craze for 

 rock-gardens, and a personal passion for know- 

 ing and consulting the personal tastes and cir- 

 cumstances of all the plants we grow ; moraines, 

 fantasies and fusses and Alpine delights of every 

 sort are planned to suit our treasures. There 

 is absolutely no notion of rule, design or propor- 

 tion, though, in rock-garden building. Although 

 it is obvious that the setting ought certainly to 

 be beautiful enough to be worthy of the actors 

 on the stage, and the actors of their setting, too : 

 neither preponderating, but both combining to 

 form a perfect harmony of beauty. A Chinese 

 or Japanese garden set with European Alpines 

 is my ideal ; or rather a garden framed on rules 

 of wisdom and design such as govern every 

 artistic or utilitarian (the words have no separate 

 connotation) action of the East. 



As it is, we hump our stones indiscriminately. 

 We study neither proportion nor arrangement. 

 We think it enough, if we grow our plants well, 

 that our stone should be piled anyhow. We have 



