AND 
GARDEN GUIDE. 
ROCKWORK. 
all the mistakes that are made in the embellishment of 
gardens, the rockery is but too frequently the most ridi- 
culous. If we stroll through any of the popular places 
of out-door resort, we are sure to see plenty of rockeries 
and raised banks ; they abound in place and out of 
place, and when they are appropriately placed it is after all a matter 
of chance, because, as they are sprinkled about everywhere, some 
few, like seed scattered by the wind, are sure to fall in suitable 
situations. The same may in a certain sense be said of the rockeries 
in private grounds, and it really makes one feel melancholy to 
reflect upon the waste of money, time, and ingenuity involved in the 
construction of many of them. 
Take a flower-garden, and in the midst of it make a pyramid of 
vitrefied bricks and flints, or throw up a hillock of huge stones, and 
set upon the top of it a small plaster statue, or a cast of Queen 
Elizabeth, or Shakespeare, or Paganini ; daub the stones over with 
blue and green paint — in fact, moss them and bronze them, and use 
plenty of colour. Then stick in anywhere a geranium, a fern or 
two, put a few shabby lilacs at the back, and make round the whole 
a gravel-path, edged with white flints or brick-rubbish, to corres- 
pond with the eminence, and you have one of these “model 
rockeries” that delight Londoners when they take their walks 
abroad, and which many of them copy in arranging their own 
grounds. It is the best fun in the whole world to visit a garden 
where there is plenty of rock-work ; but you must be reticent as to 
your opinion of it, or risk all the consequences of giving an unfor- 
givable offence, if you should speak your mind upon the matter. 
Eock-work of a certain kind is admissible almost anywhere — in 
a tank of marine fishes, in a tank of river-fishes, in a fern-shade, in 
the basin of a fountain, at the point where walks meet in flower- 
gardens, and as objects on which the eye may rest in walks through 
lawns, shrubberies, and wilderness scenery. But in every case the 
January. 1 
