Wild Gardens 



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over its discovery he might have exacted fourfold with impunity. But I 

 managed to conceal my eagerness under a most indifferent exterior, and thus 

 the tide of opportunity in the life of one rustic passed unnoticed. The 

 stump was hollowed out with age, and shaped somewhat like a boat. Filled 

 with leaf-mould, it makes a picturesque habitation for the partridge vine, 

 the flowering wintergreen, the pipsissewa, and the smaller ferns. All along 

 one side it rests upon a bed of moss, and near it I have inserted thirty 

 or forty roots of the false Solomon's seal. Back of these a more pretentious 



False Soiomon's seal 



fern bed has been planned. Here great masses of the interrupted fern have 

 been installed, along with the ostrich fern and the stately osmundas, the 

 tall varieties in the rear and sloping down to the shield ferns and the humble 

 polypody in front. Next year, if all goes well, that corner embowered 

 beneath its vine, and flanked with ferns, will be as charming as Titania's 

 dell. Even this year it was full of interest. If one had gone there in the 

 early spring, before the buds on the birch trees had burst or the grapevine 

 put forth a single leaf, one would have found the ground purple with hepatica, 

 planted the year before. They had hardly gone when the violets took 

 possession. A little later, beneath the tangled lower branches of the trees, 

 a number of stout green cones could have been seen pushing their way up 

 through the mould. These were the lady-slippers and the showy orchis. 

 All winter long I had been wondering whether the spring would call them 

 into life again, so that now I watched the unfolding of the pairs of broad. 

 oval leaves with intense interest. Probably a dozen of each had been set 

 out. All came up, and more than half of them bloomed as naturally as m 



