62 



THE PARC DES BUTTES CIIAUMONT. 



interests of gardening in mind proclaims that variety and 

 not formality should be the aim of all high gardening, the 

 better for the progress of the art. In their clumps the 

 French seem as straitlaced as ourselves, but in the newer 

 gardens they have adopted a system of dotting about single 

 specimens of individual beauty, which is very successful in 

 breaking up formalism, and is well worthy of imitation. 



The chief feature of the place, as previously indicated^ is 

 the great cliff, and unhappily the chief feature of the rock 

 is plaster. You can hardly approach it in any place with- 

 out perceiving the seams of plaster giving out, and where 

 this is not the case it is all palpably plastered. And why ? 

 Perhaps the plasterer who made it could supply a reason; 

 but, whether he can or not, the sooner plasterers are dis- 

 pensed with as imitators of nature in her grandest workings 

 the better. There never was in a garden such a chance 

 of presenting walls of rock -plants almost as striking and inte- 

 resting as those one meets with in the pass over the Simplon ; 

 yet it is entirely lost. By leaving the chinks and filling 

 them here and there with turf, by chopping back or leaving 

 the face of the high rocks sloping in some places so that 

 they would be well exposed to the rainfall, by trickling a 

 little streamlet over the face of the cliffs here and there^ 

 and by scattering a few packets of seeds over the face of the 

 cliffs in spring, they would have given rise to an alpine 

 vegetation of great beauty. The great long-leaved Saxi- 

 frage of the Pyrenees might have spread forth its silvery 

 rosettes here, so might its smaller relatives, its big brother 

 of the Piedmontese valleys, and little Campanulas, Thymes^ 

 Erinuses, Brooms, Stonecrops, Houseleeks of many kinds, 

 with hundreds of the prettiest plants of northern and tem- 

 perate climes might have been grown here. Now all is 

 daubed over and plantless, save a bit of ivy and wiry 

 grass in some few spots ; and the face of the high rocks is 

 suggestive of little but suicide. 



One of the few attempts to cultivate alpine plants out 

 of ]30ts that I have ever seen made in France is here, but 

 it has been done on a mistaken principle. A tasteful and 

 desirable practice in some of the newer gardens and parks 



