264 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 



nourish goldfish in your pools, see to it that the water 

 be deep enough to guarantee them from the heron's 

 marauding bill. Indeed, the too common fault in pond- 

 building is shallowness, which fosters slime and water- 

 weed to an intolerable extent, and makes more disastrous 

 the silting up of dead leaves in autumn and winter. A 

 shallow pond must needs be exhaustively cleaned out 

 each season, and even so the job will never be satisfactory 

 for more than a month. Intolerable sight, a shallow 

 little basin all a muck of weeds and autumn wreckage ; 

 not to mention that water-weed clogs and ultimately 

 conquers even the most stalwart Nymphaeas. Therefore I 

 would prescribe no less a depth than four feet for the 

 pond, and will now begin at last to prescribe for those 

 who refuse to be daunted by my jeremiads, and insist on 

 having a water-garden. And, first of all, let me say that 

 if the water-garden be hard to keep in order, yet, if kept 

 in order, dainty and clean, it is the very jewel and eye 

 and omphalos of the rock - garden, doubling its own 

 beauty by the neighbourhood of grey stone, and doubling 

 the beauty of the stone by its own limpid light. Pray, 

 then, and make offering to the high gods that you may 

 have running water in abundance at your disposal. So you 

 shall have a little mountain stream to bubble and splash 

 through the rock-garden, trickling dispersedly down over 

 the shoulder of the Alpine bog, and so to leap like Niagara 

 into a bright sparkling little lake below. 



In planning your lake, be very careful of its curves. 

 Map and scheme with the utmost deliberation. Unfor- 

 tunately, this is not a question for general law-giving, 

 as the lie of each piece of ground must determine the 

 proper shape of any piece of water. But a misplaced 

 bay or promontory will be as fatal to the harmony of 

 your design as a duly, tactfully placed one will be satis- 

 fying and completing. Therefore go at the shaping of 



