SMALL ROCK-GARDENS 99 



just below them are little Ferns, and in all vacant 

 places tufts and sheets of mossy Saxifrage, coolest and 

 freshest-looking of alpine herbage. These various 

 members of the mossy branch of the great Saxifrage 

 family are some of the most valuable of rock-garden 

 plants, and in a small place like mine can be well 

 employed to give some sort of feeling of unity to what 

 Avould otherwise be only a piece of floral patchwork, 

 especially if the plants and their mossy setting are 

 placed as much as possible in long drifts rather than 

 in compact patches. I think this principle is of so 

 much importance that I shall not refrain from 

 repeating it, for I have found it to be of value in all 

 kinds of planting, whether of small or large plants in 

 rockery or border, of Daffodils in copse or meadow, or 

 of tree and shrub in larger spaces. 



For the effectual destruction of any pictorial 

 effect in a rock-garden, no method of arrangement can 

 be so successful as the one so very frequently seen, of 

 little square or round enclosures of stones placed on 

 end, with the plant inside conspicuously labelled. It 

 always makes me think of cattle-pens in a market, 

 and that the surrounding stones are placed prison- 

 wise, less for the plant's comfort than for its forcible 

 detention. And it leads to the stiffest and least in- 

 teresting way of planting. If there are three plants 

 they go in a triangle ; if four, in a square ; if five, in a 

 square w^ith one in the middle, and so on. For even 

 if a little rockery be avowedly artificial, as in many 



