Poet's Narcissus in the grass at Belmont, Ireland, p'rom a photograph sent by Mr. J. H. Thomas. 



CHAPTER XII. 



THE WILD GARDEN. 



O universal Mother, who dost keep 

 From everlasting thy foundations deep, 

 Eldest of things, Great Earth, I sing of thee. 



In a rational system of flower-gardening one of the first things to 

 do is to get a clear idea of the aim of the " Wild Garden." When 

 I began to plead the cause of the innumerable hardy flowers against 

 the few tender ones put out in a formal way, the answer sometimes 

 was, " We cannot go back to the mixed border " — that is to say, 

 to the old way of arranging flowers in borders. Thinking, then, 

 much of the vast world of plant beauty shut out of our gardens 

 by the " s)-stem " then in vogue, I was led to consider the ways in 

 which it might be brought into them, and of the " Wild Garden " as a 

 home for numbers of beautiful hardy plants from other countries which 

 might be naturalised, with very little trouble, in our gardens, fields, and 

 woods — a world of delightful plant beauty that we might make happy 

 around us, in places bare or useless. I saw that we could grow thus 

 not only flowers more lovely than those commonly seen in what is 

 called the flower garden, but also many \\hich, by any other plan, we 

 should have little chance of seeing. 



The term " Wild Garden " is applied to the placing of perfectly 



