218 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 



tion. And if people would only realise how little stone 

 is necessary to the good rock-garden, they would also 

 realise, as one pleasant consequence among many, how 

 cheap and easy it is to make a rock-garden. You don't 

 want many rocks, nor mighty ones ; you want skill and 

 discernment in placing the very few you really require. 

 Let this encourage many thousands more to cultivate 

 Alpines. 



I think that of all corners of the world the Alpine bog 

 is the most wholly sparkling and deifying there can be. 

 Hemmed in by the rich heaviness of tropical forests, I 

 gasp and catch my breath at the memory of certain 

 glittering Oread-haunted meadows, ten thousand feet 

 above the ordinary world. The thought of them, amid 

 the dense warmth, is a sudden plunge into water cold 

 and clear and radiant as diamond ; it arrests the pulses 

 of the heart for a dizzy instant, then sets them leaping 

 forward with redoubled zeal. — Or perhaps it is the naked, 

 lonely valley of Upper Tees, rolling away in mile after 

 mile of purple and yellow Pansies, girt in by huge slug- 

 gish hills, and filled with a clean silence and an utter 

 loneliness beyond imagination. Here, on broken places 

 above the little bogs, shine in the short herbage wide 

 stars of Gentiana verna. Here the soaking shingle of 

 the streams is tufted with golden masses of Saxifraga 

 aeizoeides, and on their banks rise the dull violet spikes 

 of Bartsia alpina. Long and faithful search, perhaps, will 

 show you treasures even more sacrosanct — fair frail 

 Arenaria uliginosa, in the marshes of Widdy Bank, and 

 Viola arenaria on dry patches of the upper slopes; or 

 Saxifraga Hircuhis, dwindling to extinction in the very 

 stream-bed of Cronkley. High in black humus-bogs of 

 the Fell lives tiny, fairy-like Thalictrum alpinum, and 

 Rubus Chamaemorus makes carpets of its vine-like leaves 

 over the upmost moors. 



