XVII 



ALL KINDS OF GARDENS 

 ^HERE are five kinds o{ places in the world which 



A offer difficulties in the way of gardening that 

 the amateur is likely to feel are insurmountable. 

 These are rocky ledges; wet, marshy spots; sand dunes 

 or their equivalent; shady places; and a hillside so nearly 

 vertical that even the earth hardly sticks to it. But 

 nothing is insurmountable — there is something that 

 will grow in every place in the world — except possibly 

 on the perfectly bare face of a rock — never doubt that. 



The reasons which account for failure in gardening 

 therefore, are the same reasons that account for failure 

 in other undertakings — lack of study of conditions, and 

 failure to adapt our endeavors to them, after they are 

 studied — to those, at least, which are unalterable. 

 For certain natural conditions are unalterable, in the 

 main. Springs cannot be dried up, nor rivers turned 

 from their courses ordinarily ; the sandy earth which has, 

 in some long gone age, been the bed of the sea, cannot 

 be transformed into the rich loam of river bottom-lands ; 

 stern, rock-ribbed mountain- sides cannot be dissolved 

 into the softness of smiling fields. These, and some 

 other things, we cannot change. 



