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Garden Rockery - How to Make, Plant and Manage Them
Garden Rockery - How to Make, Plant and Manage Them
Garden Rockery - How to Make, Plant and Manage Them
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Garden Rockery - How to Make, Plant and Manage Them

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This vintage book contains a handbook of garden rockery, being a guide to how to make, plant, and manage it. Comprehensive and profusely illustrated, this accessible guide will appeal to modern green-fingered readers, and would make for a fantastic addition to collections of gardening literature. Contents include: “The Garden”, “Mircocosm of Nature”, “What is Rockery?”, “What Stone to Use”, “Soil”, “Formation”, “Fern Rockery”, “Flowering Plants”, “Hedge-Banks and Old Walls”, and “The Big and the Small Rockery”. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction on the history of gardening. This book was first published in 1908.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 16, 2013
ISBN9781446546444
Garden Rockery - How to Make, Plant and Manage Them

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    Garden Rockery - How to Make, Plant and Manage Them - Francis George Heath

    GARDEN ROCKERY

    Rockery and water (page 164).

    GARDEN ROCKERY

    HOW TO MAKE, PLANT

    AND MANAGE IT

    BY

    FRANCIS GEORGE HEATH

    EDITOR OF GILPIN’S Forest Scenery

    AUTHOR OF The Green Gateway, The Fern Paradise, The Fern World

    Our British Trees, The Fern Portfolio, My Garden Wild

    Tree Gossip, Autumnal Leaves, Sylvan Spring

    Sylvan Winter, Our Woodland Trees

    Burnham Beeches, Where to

    Find Ferns, Peasant Life

    The English Peasantry

    etc.

    WITH FORTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS

    PREFACE

    THE object of this little volume is to please and interest every one. It may be supposed that this is a very ambitious object. On the contrary, it is a very modest one. Those catering for public amusement and instruction give most pleasure who demand the smallest toll in the shape of study and trouble. Most people like to be easily amused. Life nowadays is so strenuous, and bread-winning, and other of the more important occupations of men and women, require such an expenditure of mental and physical energy, that there is none left to devote to recreation which involves a lot of preliminary study and preparation.

    An expert and accomplished botanist said to me not long ago that he did not believe in royal roads to the study of plants. I replied: Well, then, I suppose, if your life and fortune demanded an immediate visit to Paris, you would not dream of acquiring, rapidly, just as much of the language of that city as would enable you to go over and transact your business, but would insist on spending at least a year in mastering French before you started!

    The name of the lovers of gardening is Legion ; but how many would indulge in the fascinating pastime if a condition-precedent were a thorough knowledge of botany—which requires a lifetime ?

    I believe that a little knowledge is not a dangerous thing, but is, oftentimes, a very delightful thing! and I am going to show the worn and worried man, or woman, of business how to obtain a maximum of enjoyment with a minimum of preliminary attention and consideration.

    There is no garden, however large, there is no forecourt or backyard, however dark, small, and miserable-looking, that cannot be improved and brightened by the introduction of a larger or smaller bit of rockery. There are plants that will live and thrive in the most dismal and depressing of shady corners; and the owner or occupier of dwellings to which such shady, dismal corners are attached—whether or not he is interested in what is called gardening—is bound to be refreshed and comforted by the addition to them of something fresh and green!

    Every human being is, consciously or unconsciously, a nature lover! The human brain, the human mind, cannot help being pleasurably affected by God’s sunshine and God’s green growing things, and by all the sensuous colours and perfumes and tastes of the beautiful vegetable world.

    Rockery is the most delightful and suggestive of all garden adjuncts; for it is reminiscent of the most exquisite of country scenes; it is a microcosm of mountain and valley, calling up to the eye and to the ear the crystal flash of running water—the loud melody of the roaring torrent, or the dreamy gurgle of the flowing brook.

    How to produce this microcosm of the bold crag and the soft splendour of the gently-undulating hill-side is the object of the succeeding chapters.

    FRANCIS GEORGE HEATH

    SILVERTON.

    CONTENTS

    LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

    1. A grassy bridlepath

    2. Masses of rock

    3. Rocks flung together

    4. Varying shapes of rock

    5. Trees in rocky hollows

    6. Top of moorland hill-side

    7. Giant superposed rocks

    8. Badly constructed rockery

    9. Properly constructed rockery

    10. Picturesque limestone rockery

    11. Our own rockery

    12. The Lady Fern

    13. The Lady Fern (another view)

    14. Soft Prickly Shield Fern

    15. Fern rockery against house wall

    16. The Royal Fern

    17. Group of British ferns

    18. The Shield Ferns

    19. The Buckler Ferns

    20. The polypodies

    21. The spleenworts

    22. The common primrose

    23. Hedge-side Shield Fern

    24. Shield Fern in hedge

    25. Hedge-side Shield Ferns

    26. A tangle of ferns

    27. Common polypody in hedge

    28. Hedge-bank polypodies

    29. Hartstongue in hedge-bank

    30. Hedge-bank with hartstongue

    31. Male fern and ivy in hedge

    32. Male fern and ivy

    33. Hartstongue on wall

    34. Bit of stonework

    35. Stonework in fence

    36. Bank stonework

    37. A bit of old wall

    38. Old wall and hedge

    39. Wild tangle awaiting adornment

    40. A rock garden walk

    41. Open rockery showing pockets, etc.

    42. Rockery for carpeting

    43. Rockery and running water

    44. Rockery and water

    45. Rockery on a massive scale

    GARDEN ROCKERY

    I

    THE GARDEN

    PERHAPS in the whole of our language there is no word whose meaning is more elastic than the one which heads our first chapter. A garden is a place where plants are cultivated by man, in contradistinction to one where they grow wild. Strictly speaking, it means an enclosure (of any kind) which is first cleared of its natural wild growth and then replenished with such a selection of plants as the cultivator may prefer.

    A garden may be simply a small pot, or box, filled with earth and some little plant or plants, or it may extend to thousands of acres, stretching away as far as the eye can see in every direction, and comprising specimens of almost everything contained in the vegetable world.

    It will be interesting, perhaps, in view of the rapid growth during the last year or two of the taste for nature-study, to advert to the present writer’s explanation, penned more than a quarter of a century ago, of the reason for the origination and extension of the love of gardening. He wrote: "The world, as understood to consist, not of so many cubic miles of matter, but of so much flesh and blood, and so much brick-and-mortar work—the populated or residential, as distinguished from the physical or natural world—is continually increasing. Towns are getting bigger, and populations are growing denser; and though natural resources give few signs of falling off, the struggle for existence is becoming keener. The town, being of man’s making, is, like all man’s works, imperfect. It is, in fact, of all human constructions the most imperfect; and citizens, by a natural and uncontrollable instinct, have always turned from it, on every opportunity, towards ‘the country.’ The early institution of ‘the garden’ furnishes proof of the ancient existence of this feeling, which has grown with the growth of cities, and is stronger in the present day than it has ever been before. Of the various expedients adopted in modern times to give pleasure to urban populations, and to relieve the tedium of city life, there can scarcely be one which is more delightful, in every way, than the institution of city gardens. The love of Nature, which is innate in most people, has had less and less opportunity of indulgence as our towns have grown larger and larger, until city life and country life have become two distinct phases of existence. But as the augmentation of the number of human dwellings in any particular place has caused the country to be pushed, so to speak, further and further away, the love of Nature has, on the part of those compelled to live within the lines of bricks and mortar, become more and more intense in proportion as the absence from natural objects has become more prolonged. If, how-ever, city people cannot always visit the

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