There is a work at North Easton of which I am supposed to be the designer, which I have partly superintended and as to which you still encourage me to give you advice. I cannot if I would escape responsibility for it and it weighs on my conscience that I did not attempt to tell you the other day, when you took me to it, how far I am from taking your cheerful view of it.

The extremely rude and ungainly jumble of rocks first built is in itself an object of great ugliness and wholly unsuitable to the situation. Unless one had reason {otherwise} for thinking the man who planned it not a fool {and} could conjecture that it had been intended to be used as a foundation backing or core for some work to be done over it, it could be regarded only as a monstrosity and this view was expressed in the first name popularly given to it of “Jumbo”. [398]To make it extremely ridiculous, it was only necessary that it should fall into the unfortunate courses that it since has which have provoked the name it now has of the “Rockery”. It is in fact, a cheap magnified caricature of a paltry garden rockery. But let its present promise be fulfilled in a few years it will get another name—“The Folly”.

Now the structure was built for a purpose which if it could have been realized would have made the affair elegant, appropriate, becoming and with reference to its value not costly. It would have been an object fit to be associated with the noble structure, nobly placed, standing over against it. It would have graced the village and been as creditable to all concerned as that which now appears is discreditable.

There is no prospect in all that at present appears that it ever will be realized. There is less prospect of it now than there was last year or the year before. I do not know how to account for its present condition, for of all the plants that were arranged to be set out last year on the face of the jumble and along its base I did not see that a single one remained alive, while there were hundreds flourishing horribly that I had not advised.

It can never be a decent thing standing where it does until the Jumbo wall is covered with the originally designed close-fitting dress of fine, delicate foliage. The foliage of the plants now growing upward from the outer base work is and always will be worthless until the proper body dress is to be seen through it, or, as more particularly in the case of the glossy evergreens, blending with it. The Virginia Creeper will not supply this body dress. The great coarse sedums planted last year will not. The pallid anonymus planted last year, (I am tempted to think as a practical joke by someone who knew how strongly I objected to them), will not. All these things only make the affair more nonsensical and the expenditure thus far made for it the more wasteful provided nothing more is accomplished.

I tell you this because you have allowed the planting season to go by without making another effort to secure the only means possible of turning the thing to any good account. I did not make a visit to it this spring because I thought that you perfectly understood what was wanted and if the arrangements of last year had failed you would know what to do and might think a repetition of my advice officious and intrusive. But apparently the bad luck of the thing has discouraged you. And now I must say that it would be shameful to let it stand as it is. If what the stone work was intended for cannot be realized the stone work ought to be torn down. In the prominent place it occupies, and in the presence of so much good work as has been done in the village, it is indecent and with its present planting will only grow more and more so.

Why should the attempt be abandoned and the design condemned and made a laughing stock? (as it is when you call it a rockery). The answer is that after three years, of hundreds of the plants principally depended on to supply the essential feature of the undertaking hardly any remain alive. (a part and an important part from the first reckoned upon, have never been planted). Three [399]

years in succession Robinson has promised to supply them and to have them set by a competent planter and every time broken his promise.

Was I wrong in supposing that the plants in question were likely with proper care to live and flourish and accomplish the desired end? It would certainly appear so if you looked only at what has occurred at the Cairn. But I believe that a certain number of every one of these plants are growing on the Memorial Ground close by, and if not flourishing it is simply because the ground has been left too sterile for them. You will find one growing profusely upon the walls of the Lodge up to the full height of the walls of the Cairn. You will find on the wall back of the Rosery thousands of the house-leek and stonecrop that I have asked for that have been planted there since Robinson failed of his promise to supply them to the Cairn. All that are wanted to stock the Cairn could be taken from there and hardly be missed. As to the green Euonymus, I bought a lot for myself out of the same stock that I bought for you, and though I have lost some from mice I have hundreds of them flourishing, so that I have had in some cases to take a ladder to trim them. You have just enough of them growing yet along the base of the Cairn to show that there is nothing in the circumstances fatal to them. If the hundreds that have been planted and are not now to be seen have not [400]

been purposely destroyed or stolen (which I suggest because some of mine have been); if they have been rightly treated by your gardener, then the failure is to be considered due simply to an extraordinary run of bad luck such as a man must be prepared to encounter occasionally in any such undertaking, and there is no more reason to give up the original purpose than there was when it was started.

As I do not wish unnecessary risks to be taken in another trial I do not urge the replanting of the Euonymus this year. But I have had a hundred small plants that had been propagated on my own ground set in nursery rows which I shall ask you to let me set next spring, and I will send you a lot of runners in addition which your garden can grow. I will try to secure also a lot of good plants of Japan ivy, (unfortunately I don’t know of any for sale in the country.) What can be done this year is to plant, in the upper part of the wall more particularly, a thousand or so of the various kinds of little delicate ferns that are growing in dryish rocky places all about you. A cart load of them could be gathered in an hour. I enclose examples of some of the best. Also, if Mr F. L. Ames was right in supposing that stonecrop and house-leeks are growing abundantly in the fields near you, a great lot of them should be used in all the upper parts of the work, inside and out, being stuffed into cracks, joints, crevices and crannies, where a teaspoonful of dirt can go with them. The next fortnight will be as good a time as any during the year for this business.

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Take a charitable view of my importunities. If you can afford to have the undertaking fail I cannot. All that is likely to come of it unless the essential planting shall be made to succeed, would be regarded in a few years as disgraceful to me. For any further services that you will accept of me in the matter I shall make no charge.

Very Truly Yours