THE MOUNTAIN BOG 215 



CHAPTER XI 



'E\tt 9^ountatn ^og 



And now, having clothed the high banks and outlying 

 copsy slopes of our ideal dell, let us gladly come to the 

 furnishing of the choice open space in the middle, where 

 a tank of concrete, as large as you can make it, has been 

 filled with light and pleasant soil, provided with drainage- 

 holes and outlets, and given a gentle little brook to 

 meander across its surface. Not, as I have said before — 

 and now repeat for the encouragement of the dispirited — 

 not that the concrete tank is at all inevitably necessary. 

 If you have drainage, and running water, and light rich 

 soil, you will have no need of it ; the concrete tank is 

 simply my ideal precaution which can never do any harm, 

 and which may, in a blazing climate, devoid of rain, and 

 on a parching sandy soil, devoid of nutritious elements 

 and running water, give you lasting joy in a bog-garden 

 where you otherwise could not have one at all. Of 

 course, where ideals are to be talked of, probabilities no 

 longer count ; and I will now be brave enough to say 

 that in my own dearest, most private ideal, the choice 

 bog-garden shall not be, as I have so far timidly pre- 

 tended, in the depth of a shallow dell or hollow, ringed 

 in by lush leafage of lily and fern and giant harebell. 

 No; it shall be high up — high, high up, on a bare 

 shoulder of the rock-work. Behind it lofty cliiFs of stone 

 shall converge to a canon at the end, through which a 



