156 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 



grave], or flow down a salutary slope. But wherever 

 your soil is retentive, it will always be wisest to give the 

 garden a fair start by preparing the ground thoroughly 

 beforehand, and arming it against catastrophes. Your 

 ultimate success will trebly and quadruply repay your 

 initial trouble. Never scant initial trouble, never despise 

 it. Half the world's horticultural tragedies arise because 

 gardeners, for one reason or another, fail to make their 

 preparations complete, fail to be thorough with the long, 

 tiresome, and sometimes expensive preparatory measures. 

 Neglect initial precautions, save a few sixpences in the 

 matter of drainage, concrete or what not, when you are 

 making your garden, and you will certainly have to spend 

 many sad laborious years, and many unprofitable pounds, 

 in trying vainly to make good your own deficiencies, to 

 do, with difficulty and pain, what might and should have 

 been done properly and easily at first. For it is never 

 easy to make good an error ; a thing obvious and simple 

 to do in its own good time, becomes difficult and dreadful 

 to accomplish when its time has gone by ; and very rarely, 

 with great trouble and misery, can one ever catch up the 

 lost years, and make a tardy botch of what should have 

 been a simple, workmanly job in the earliest beginning of 

 one's scheme. 



I speak all this feelingly; I was seduced, in the far- 

 off" years when I was making the Old Garden, and worrying, 

 through my own ignorance, into saving labour here, and 

 saving labour there, into allowing thoroughness of work 

 to pass as insignificant, into yielding to various pernicious 

 ' dodges,' because they were cheap. Result : the Old 

 Garden for years has been a sore burden, an unrewarding 

 toil, a daughter of the horseleech in its rapacity. Money 

 in floods has been poured down its bottomless gullet of 

 late seasons, in a vain effort to reclaim it ; and it is only 

 now, after ten struggling years of failure, that the thing 



