As regards the Alpine garden, the first thing to be remembered is, that the rockwork on which it is to be formed should look as natural as possible. Nothing can be more hideous than the usual varieties of suburban rockeries, where the intention seems to be to make everything as unnatural and distorted as can well be imagined How well one knows the jagged fragments of red sandstone standing on end, or the blocks of various formations heaped up together, with bits of green glass, coarse coral, and big shells stuck in at different corners, and with cement between to keep all in place.[6] The rocks used should, if possible, be the rocks of the country; they should appear to crop up from the soil; and they should be so laid that plants should really be able to grow in their fissures and interstices. Scarcely less important is the choice of a site, for if the rock-garden is placed under the drip of trees it is hopeless to expect that any of the more delicate and beautiful Alpine plants can thrive. Most ferns, on the other hand, will of course do better in moist, shady places; so that it is impossible successfully to combine the Alpine garden and the fernery, as is very often attempted. Let the Alpine plants have sun and light, and give the ferns the cool shade in which they are most at home. Aquilegias and a few other woodland flowers may be planted in among the osmunda, the hart’s-tongue, and other hardy ferns; and rare mosses and lichens may be taught to cling to the darker clefts and hollows of the rock, as in one rockery which I know, where the “shining moss” (_Schistostega pennata_) catches and refracts the sunlight with a metallic lustre like that of the humming-bird’s breast. One of the greatest ornaments to a garden is a fountain, but many fountains are curiously ineffective. A fountain is most beautiful when it leaps high into the air, and you can see it against a background of green foliage. To place a fountain among low flower-beds, and then to substitute small fancy jets, that take the shape of a cup, or trickle over into a basin of gold-fish, or toy with a gilded ball, is to do all that is possible to degrade it. The real charm of a fountain is, when you come upon it in some little grassy glade of the “pleasaunce,” where it seems as though it sought, in the strong rush of its waters, to vie with the tall boles of the forest-trees that surround it. Such was the fountain in Leigh Hunt’s _Story of Rimini_, which shot up “beneath a shade of darksome pines,” “And ’twixt their shafts you saw the water bright, Which through the tops glimmered with show’ring light.”