In My Vicarage Garden 



harm for those who come after him. As an 

 instance of the ease of taking up difficult plants 

 there, I may say that the evening before I went 

 away I wished to find some seedlings of the 

 handsome Gentiana punctata which I had marked 

 by the lake side not far from the hotel, for I knew 

 that a full-grown G. punctata has a big root which 

 it is almost hopeless to attempt to dig up with 

 any chance of success. I soon found the plants, 

 and among them many little ones that seemed 

 exactly what I wanted. But I also found they 

 were no seedlings ; the little bunch of radical 

 leaves concealed a root stock more than an inch 

 in diameter, and it took several minutes of work 

 with the alpenstock to follow the root to the end, 

 and then it turned out to be nearly a yard in 

 length, with many ramifications, but the nature 

 of the soil allowed me to get all I wanted without 

 any injury to the roots. All collectors should 

 remember that it is of the first importance not to 

 bruise or break any of the roots ; if they are 

 bruised or broken, nature's first work is to heal 

 the wounds, and while so doing little other work 

 is done to the life of the plant ; and if they are 

 badly bruised and are long out of the ground and 

 so get dried, death is almost certain. Collectors 

 should also remember that it is labour in vain 

 with a great many plants to take them from 

 a soil of one marked character and transplant 

 them into another. All the plants at Piora 

 grow in the debris of primary rocks at a high 



