A WILDWOOD GARDEN. 



Down in my low land which fronts on the bay is a strip of the 

 wettest and blackest muck varying from twenty-five to forty 

 feet wide and a hundred and fifty feet long and lying at the base 

 of the high, rocky hammock. At its southeastern border is an 

 artificial pool and along the northeastern part is a tract of slightly 

 elevated marl. In this whole area is a dense growth of tangled, 

 scrubby vegetation; Yaupon (Ilex cassine}, Wax Myrtle (Myrica 

 cerifera), two kinds of Pond Apple .(Annona), Persimmon (Dios- 

 pyros wrginiana) , a couple of willows, Wild Rubber (Ficus), 

 Red Bay (Persea), Button Bush (Cephalanthus) , and Button- 

 wood (Conocarpus), the latter being a strange tree which, al- 

 though upright in growth when young, almost always falls over 

 when it has acquired age. In one place there is a large clump of 

 swamp magnolias (Magnolia glauca), and there is quite a growth 

 of large saw palmetto here and there. The axils of the leaves of 

 this palm are admirable places for sword and other ferns and the 

 irregular cavities in the trunks of the buttonwoods prove equally 

 good for this purpose. On the floor of the swamp were masses of 

 royal ferns (Osmunda spectabilis) , which is distributed over all the 

 eastern United States and probably is found in Europe. There 

 were also a few clumps of the great Acrostichums (A. aureum 

 and A. lomarioides) , which are the largest ferns in our country. 

 On the trees and shrubs were a few epiphytic orchids and quite a 

 number of air pines (Tillandsias) . 



It was a wild, secluded place, shut away from the rest of the 

 grounds, and so thickly grown up that it was difficult to enter 

 it. It was pretty, but it seemed to me that I could improve a 

 little on nature or rather help her out a little. There are few 

 naturally beautiful effects of landscape gardening that nature 

 does not sometimes produce; man can create many of these 

 effects on a limited space and that was what I wanted to do ; I 

 was going to try to condense a little. 



I first made an irregular walk of broken rock, leading it around 

 to the most interesting places and this I covered with palmetto 

 leaves and other rubbish so that no one would suppose that a 



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