Snowdrops 



when other white water-side flowers are asleep. A clump 

 of it that has been slightly overrun by our beautiful 

 evergreen Sedge, Cladium mariscus, makes a pretty picture 

 every Spring, growing an extra few inches under shelter 

 of the Cladium. How seldom one sees this grand plant 

 in a garden, and I think no nurseryman stocks it. Yet 

 there are acres of it in the Norfolk Broads, and half of 

 Wicken Fen is full of it too full for my taste, for it is 

 only fed upon by one of the rare insects of the district, 

 and crowds out reed and other suitable food plants, and 

 seems to be increasing rather fast in the fen. My plants I 

 hauled up and lugged home from Norfolk not a very easy 

 job, as I was entomologising at the time, and a pocket-knife 

 and my own fingers were my only digging weapons, whilst 

 its root system is a wide-spreading mass of the toughest 

 fibres, interlaced with those of every imaginable sedge and 

 rush and weed. Once home it made up for all pains of 

 transit, and its great arching leaves are a rich green 

 throughout the year, unlike those of any other water-side 

 plant, resembling some extra fine Pampas-Grass. With the 

 exception of the New Zealand Arundo conspicua, which alas ! 

 is none too hardy here in wet places, nor too vigorous in 

 dry ones, Cladium the Fen Sedge is, so far as I know, the 

 only truly evergreen plant of similar bold grassy habit, fit 

 for the water-side. The effect of its deep green among 

 the tawny browns of reeds and bulrushes in autumn and 

 winter is very fine. Nurserymen take note, also take a 

 holiday in the Broads, take a spade and a sack, and make 

 a fortune out of three-and-sixpenny snippets in thumb-pots 

 of Cladium mariscus. 



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