o meet with a
little resistance, and despise a bed that is made too comfortable.
Self-sown ones often come up much more vigorously through the hard
path than when the seed has fallen within the border. The way to grow
the parsley fern is said to be to clap a good big stone on his crown
very early in the spring, and let him struggle out at all corners from
underneath it. It is undoubtedly a comfort to rock-plants and creeping
things to be planted with a stone over their feet to keep them cool!

Which reminds me of stones for bordering. I think they make the best
of all edgings for a Little Garden. Box-edgings are the prettiest, but
they are expensive, require good keeping, and harbor slugs. For that
matter, most things seem to harbor slugs in any but a very dry
climate, and there are even more prescriptions for their destruction
than that of lawn weeds. I don't think lime does much, nor soot. Wet
soon slakes them. Thick slices of turnip are attractive. Slugs really
do seem to like them, even better than one's favorite seedlings.
Little heaps of bran also, and young lettuces. My slugs do not care
for cabbage leaves, and they are very untidy. Put thick slices of
turnip near your auriculas, favorite primroses and polyanthuses, and
Christmas roses, and near anything tender and not well established,
and overhaul them early in the morning. "You can't get up too early,
if you have a garden," says Mr. Warner; and he adds: "Things appear to
go on in the night in the garden uncommonly. It would be less trouble
to stay up than it is to get up so early!"

To return to stone edgings. When quite newly laid, like miniature
rockwork, they are, perhaps, the least bit cockneyfied, and suggestive
of something between oyster-shell borderings and mock ruins. But this
effect very rapidly disappears as they bury themselves in cushions of
pink catch-fly (v. _compacta_), or low-growing pinks, tiny campanulas,
yellow viola, London pride, and the vast variety of rock-plants,
"alpines," and low-growing "herbaceous stuff," which delight in
squeezing up to a big cool stone that will keep a little moisture for
their rootlets in hot summer weather. This is a much more interesting
kind of edging than any one kind of plant can make, I think, and in a
Little Garden it is like an additional border, leaving the other free
for bigger plants. If one kind is preferred, for a light soil there is
nothing like thrift. And the white thrift is very silvery and mor