MAKING A
ROCK GARDEN

It is the intention of the publishers to make this series of little volumes, of which Making a Rock Garden is one, a complete library of authoritative and well illustrated handbooks dealing with the activities of the home-maker and amateur gardener. Text, pictures and diagrams will, in each respective book, aim to make perfectly clear the possibility of having, and the means of having, some of the more important features of a modern country or suburban home. Among the titles already issued or planned for early publication are the following: Making a Rose Garden; Making a Lawn; Making a Tennis Court; Making a Fireplace; Making Paths and Driveways; Making a Poultry House; Making a Garden with Hotbed and Coldframe; Making Built-in Bookcases, Shelves and Seats; Making a Garden to Bloom This Year; Making a Water Garden; Making a Garden of Perennials; Making the Grounds Attractive with Shrubbery; Making a Naturalized Bulb Garden; with others to be announced later.

A nearly buried boulder is easily converted into a beautiful little rock garden. Fill in depressions with soil and plant there and around the edges of the boulder Phlox subulata, sedum, arabis, etc.

MAKING A
ROCK GARDEN

By H. S. ADAMS

NEW YORK
McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY
1912

Copyright, 1912, by
McBRIDE, NAST & CO.

Published May, 1912

CONTENTS

PAGE

• 
  
  
• The Rock Garden 1
• The Choice of a Site 6
• The Work of Construction 13
• Planting the Garden 24
• Plants for a Rock Garden 32
• The Wall Garden 45
• Water and Bog Gardens 50

THE ILLUSTRATIONS

• 
  
  
• An Outcropping Boulder Converted into a Rock Garden Frontispiece
• A Flight of Steps Through Rock Work 8
• An Example of Good Rock Gardening 16
• A Small Bit of Rock Work Where Two Paths Diverge 26
• Foam Flower and One of the Smaller Ferns 34
• The Rock Garden Built Along a Main Curving Path 42
• A Wall Garden Planted in Colonies 46
• A Fountain in a Wall Garden 50

Making a Rock Garden

THE ROCK GARDEN

In Europe, particularly in England, the rock garden is an established institution with a distinct following. The English works on the subject alone form a considerable bibliography.

On this side of the Atlantic, the rock garden is so little understood that it is an almost unconsidered factor in the beautifying of the home grounds. There are a few notable rock gardens in this country, all on large estates, and in more instances some excellent work has been done on a smaller and less complicated scale either by actual creation or by taking advantage of natural opportunities. But

for the most part America has confined its rock garden vision principally to the so-called "rockery."

Now a rockery, with all the good intentions lying behind it, is not a rock garden. It is no more a rock garden than a line of cedars planted in an exact circle would be a wood. A rockery is generally a lot of stones stuck in a pile of soil or, worse yet, a circular array of stones filled in with soil.

A rock garden, above all else, is not artificial; at least, so far as appearance goes. It is a garden with rocks. The rocks may be few or many, they may have been disposed by nature or the hand of man; but always the effect is naturalistic, if