The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
American Rock Gardens
BIG GROUPS FOR EXPERIMENT
By this time in the development of your rock garden you are ready to try anything. The big groups of many rock species, from which you may try endless sorts, are here listed, though not all their species are rock plants: Anemone, Dianthus, Gentiana, *Pentstemon, *Phlox, Primula, Saxifraga, Sedum, Silene, and Veronica.
The greater part of the rock plants offered by dealers as seeds or plants are from the mountains of Europe, Alps, Pyrenees, Balkans, Urals, Caucasus, or the hills of Britain and Scandinavia. Little plants from the isles of the Mediterranean or the cliffs of North Africa are often doubtfully hardy in New England, but of easy culture farther south. From Japan, and China in her many provinces, and from Siberia, many useful rock plants have come in recent years (as Primula and Gentiana), and many more will come through enthusiastic collectors. Many new herbs from New Zealand seem to be at home in English rock gardens, and some of them endure the winters of Boston. From the Andes and Patagonia a few very hardy alpines are already in cultivation, but little is known of what may be in store.
For American rock gardens, since all these plants can be imported only as seed, our own flora is more useful than that of the Alps or Yunnan. For alpines for extreme winters there are endless plants from our own peaks and the barrens from Labrador to Alaska. For rock plants of easy culture there are the small wild flowers of the hills and fields of every section. Nearly all of them are of easiest culture. Too few are as yet available. For rock gardens of little winter and long dry summers, there are tiny perennials unknown and unnoted, except by botanists, in our southern Alleghenies and the untrodden steeps and wastes of the great Southwest. The more common sorts already purchaseable are marked * in the lists, but this is but a fraction of those worthy. To the usual values . of a rock garden, we may add plant hunting and testing right at home.
