In My Vicarage Garden 



an entirely exceptional case ; the usual suburban 

 villa is not complete without its rockwork, and the 

 rockwork is almost always a triumph of ugliness. 

 The usual process is to make near the front door 

 a heap of earth of some regular shape, generally 

 oval, four or five feet high, and to place stones of 

 different sorts, spar for preference, at equal dis- 

 tances all over the heap. The likeness to a cake 

 studded with almonds is complete, and the initial 

 error is the erection of the rockwork rising out of 

 level surroundings, and wherever the ground is 

 level round a rockwork its artificial character is 

 at once revealed. A still worse form of rock 

 garden finds great favour with the suburban 

 gardener, and this is to cover a bed with blocks 

 of stone, or coloured glass scoriae, if he can get 

 them, placed at equal distances all over the surface. 

 I saw such a bed once at Southsea, quite bare 

 except for large blocks of coarse coke placed care- 

 fully on the surface with mathematical accuracy. 

 Nature is very generous in hiding anything that 

 is ugly, and filling up every vacuum, but she will 

 find it hard to change such a bed as that into a 

 thing of beauty ; and I once saw near Chester a 

 noted rock garden of really good design, and one 

 on which much money and labour had been spent, 

 but which was completely spoiled by too great 

 neatness and trimness. Not only was every shrub 

 carefully clipped, but every stone was twice a year 

 thoroughly scrubbed and scraped, so that though 

 it was more than twenty years old when I saw it 

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