WHEN “LITTLE MOUNTAIN PEOPLE” 
STEP INTO YOUR GARDEN 
LOUISE BEEBE WILDER 
Reprinted from Mrs Wilder’s recently published “Adventures In My Garden and Rock Garden” 
S ROCK GARDEN it seems to me is a delight that every 
gardener should strive to bring within his experience. 
It offers more absorbing interest, more variety, more 
beauty, greater opportunity for adventure for a lesser 
outlay of money and trouble than any other type of garden. 
And it may be equally perfect, complete, and satisfactory, both 
from a utilitarian and from an artistic standpoint, whether two 
feet square or covering an acre. 
Indeed, size has nothing to do with its beauty or relevancy, 
nor has the expense, for, while there may assuredly be rock 
gardens of vast extent, costly to build, to furnish, and to main¬ 
tain, the councils of perfection may be as truthfully served upon 
the smallest plot, by one who makes use only of such materials 
as are at hand, who raises his plants from seed at an infinitesimal 
cost, or collects them for nothing, and who may give no more 
than half an hour daily to the care and conduct of the miniature 
kingdom. As a matter of fact it is in just such small, personally 
cherished gardens where we far more often find rare and difficult 
plants well grown and happy than in more ambitious works, 
where their care is largely delegated to paid guardianship that 
is so often unsympathetic and lacking in intuitiveness. 
And no place is so small or so unpromising but an interesting 
and efficient rock garden may there be brought into being. Our 
English gardening brethren inveigh continually and emphati¬ 
cally against the presence of trees in the neighborhood of rock 
gardens, yet a vast number of American wild Powers grow 
naturally beneath deciduous trees, and furnished only with 
these and the many small bulbs that thrive in shady places, a 
rock garden built in light woodland may be filled with interest 
for many months of the year, a thing of beauty to rejoice the 
most exacting eye. And almost any other sort of situation, 
barring a swamp, may be made to furnish a fitting and comely 
home for choice rock plants and alpines if knowledge of their 
desires and necessities guide our contriving. 
It is frequently said to me, “We have no suitable place for a 
rock garden,” or, “We have no room for any garden at all.” 
But in point of fact, if you have land at all, you have a place for 
a rock garden. Naturally some situations are superior to 
others for the purpose, both as regards their physical and ar¬ 
tistic possibilities, but none is hopeless where the will to grow 
these infinitely fascinating plants strongly animates the grower. 
Many a plot now deemed too small to compass more than a 
scrap of lawn and a few Rose bushes or Geraniums might boast 
a really fine rock garden, displaying hundreds of rare and beauti¬ 
ful plants, well housed and visibly rejoicing. And the owner 
who now groans under the dull routine of keeping the grass 
shorn, and shrinks from the horrid task of removing insects 
from the exacting Queen of Flowers, would find relaxation and 
unfailing recreation in providing “top hole” service and enter¬ 
tainment for his small and ever-responsive guests from many 
lands. 
T HIS misconception of the alpine has been very general in 
our country, and still is, for the matter of that. Neverthe¬ 
less, alpines are for you, whether you live North or South, East 
or West, or in the Middle West, as I long ago found they were 
for me, when I took the trouble to gain some understanding of 
the characteristics of these little mountain people, and to supply 
the simple conditions with which all but a few of them are quite 
satisfied. For years I grew them without a proper rock garden 
at all, finding suitable homes for them in the crevices of walls 
and stone steps, along the stone-edged flower borders, and in 
little prepared beds in the nursery. But while this is quite 
practicable for a great many kinds, it is much more delightful 
to give them a home to themselves, where the more difficult 
kinds as well, may be made snug and safe, and where all show 
to much greater advantage than when seen in competition with 
the fat border perennials, whose overfed charms detract from 
the special quality of clean and sparkling brilliance that charac¬ 
terizes so many of the small mountain plants. 
1t is well, perhaps, at the outset in thinking of a home for rock 
plants to discard the term “rockery,” as having come, because 
of countless awful examples disfiguring gardens in past years, to 
mean primarily a place where rocks are harbored and where 
plants find their graves. Even the newer term of “ rock garden ” 
seems in some danger, alas, of being too literally interpreted, and 
one sees gardens where the builder has quite patently become 
so enamoured of his stones as to have lost sight of the fact that 
they are, or should be, quite secondary in importance to the 
plants that dwell among them—merely a means to an end and 
not in themselves, so to speak, the whole show. Though it must 
be understood that the greater one’s appreciation of the inherent 
beauty of stones, and the more sympathetic the understanding 
of their place in nature, the more success shall one have in 
adapting them with truth and sincerity to fashioning a rock 
garden of real beauty and utility. 
A ROCK GARDEN IN THE PRAIRIE REGION 
ARTHUR G. ELDREDGE 
Emphatic Vindication of the Rock Garden Idea Even for the Arid 
Stretches of the Interior—Tested Plants that Endure the Glaring Sun 
I IETHER the cause is personal indisposition or fear of 
the baking summer suns in the prairie region, I do not 
teflfVjiA know; but it is well proven that there are many who 
Ib&ffl admire flowers and a good garden made by someone else! 
And certainly the traveler observes that even ordinary perennial 
and annual gardens are quite the exception, and a rock garden is 
indeed a rarity in that part of the country. 
A few years ago Prof. Dorner, of the University of Illinois, 
had excavated a six-foot depression through a little prairie swell 
that lay in front of the Floriculture Building at Urbana. Some 
small boulders were collected and placed in the slopes, and stone 
steps made two levels of the garden. Many of the customary 
rock garden plants were used, and many ordinary perennials 
added to give seasonal bloom. Shrubs were planted around the 
30 
