Rockery and Alpine Garden. 
283 
I shall be doing a service to many by describing it ; perhaps with sufficient 
particularity to enable them to imitate its plan more or less if they so please. 
For where there is one person who can spend money freely enough to give 
him a rock garden, or even a rockery of any pretensions, constructed on lines 
hitherto usual, there are scores who would gladly reach the same result if only 
the res augusla domi did not prevent. 
“ But I do not wish to exaggerate or mislead. This garden could not have 
been a tithe as fine as it is without a considerable knowledge of plants, nor 
without a judicious outlay upon them, nor without much care and enthusiasm 
annually spent upon it and its tenants. It has profited, too, from being upon 
a fine soil, and from being set in rural and pleasant surroundings of lawn 
and shrubs. But after all allowance made on these accounts, it remains 
perhaps the best practical working model which I can recall for the man who 
wants a beautiful result without an elaborate or costly construction, who can¬ 
not afford a big rockery or rock garden, but who wants to make a fine alpine 
collection at only a moderate expenditure of money and labour. The key to 
this success is found in the simplicity of its plan, in the substitution of plants 
for large rocks or stones, and in the avoidance of weedy subjects in the 
planting. 
“ I do not mean to say that a good deal more fine effect of a sort may not 
be got by large rock garden constructions, nor even that some cultural 
advantage may not be secured by the skilful employment of rocks, large or 
small, for that purpose. But I do say that such effect is the quality which 
the genuine plant-lover may most readily dispense with if cost is an object, 
and that fine plants are a very fair substitute indeed for much stone. And as 
regards the relative cultural advantages of the two systems (which I will call 
respectively the elaborate and the simple), all I now need say is that, with 
some knowledge of the subject, and of rock gardens public and private, I do 
not recall any space of equal size containing a greater number of plants, 
choice, interesting, beautiful, and well-grown, than this simple and exquisite 
‘ mound garden ’ at Loxwood, for thus it may fairly be described. A series 
of mounds or ‘ hummocks * made of good gritty soil; in form slug-shaped, 
kidney-shaped, or irregularly oval; some much or little higher than others ; 
some sinking at intervals to the ground level, and enabling you to step across 
them over sunk stepping stones ; such stones again used casually and at odd 
intervals to vary the surface, or to help hold up the soil (but not necessarily 
forming any part of the scheme of construction) ; the pathways gravelled, 
