THE GREATER BOG-PLANTS 185 
will turn your wretched garden into an ell with an 
initial H. 
If you have unlimited space at your disposal, and high 
bold corners, you will not, of course, omit the Gunneras 
and the Pampas-Grass. Nothing is more magnificent than 
a big old clump of Pampas, drooping and weeping and 
luxuriating over a lake, from some lofty precipitous point 
of rock-work falling sheer towards the water. Itis so I have 
it in my Old Garden, and for once, the actual makes 
a model for the ideal. ‘The effect is splendid and mar- 
moreal. ‘The Gunneras do not waken my zeal to the 
same extent. They are immense—‘d formes architectu- 
rales’—like gigantic Rhubarbs, swollen in a nightmare. 
Their hardiness hovers on the edge of doubt; they like a 
little sifted ash for protection in winter ; and, altogether, 
if I am to tell the truth, I myself admire the great cut- 
leaved Rhubarb, Rheum palmatum, with its towering 
spires of crimson blossom, to the umbrella-like enormous- 
ness of the Gunnera-foliage, concealing their stodgy dull 
spikes of greenish-yellow flowers, like gigantic bottle- 
cleaners. On the other hand, while Gunnera scabra and 
Gunnera manicata are so colossal as to have no place in 
any garden that cannot be measured by the mile, Gunnera 
magellanica is so minute as hardly to be visible to the 
naked eye, and certainly is no more covetable than the 
common Coltsfoot, though, possibly, less of a pest. 
Of foliage plants for the lake-side, though, or the big 
bog, there is nothing to surpass the Rodgersias—the old 
podophylla, with wide, bristly, five-cleft leaves, bright and 
glossy, ranging from emerald green through every shade of 
red, bronze and purple. The plant runs freely and forms 
a fine sheet of shining leafage on a slope—as I saw it once 
clothing a whole hillside in the Hokkaido, though 
its flower spikes, just rising above the leaves on their two- 
feet stalwart stems, are not of any great decorative 
