74 WALL AND WATER GARDENS 



down at the moistest pool edge are Nephrodium 

 Thelypteris and Lomaria, and a little way up on the 

 cool bank, always in shade, the North American 

 Onoclea sensibilis. In a moist nook already filled with 

 Sphagnum, in this region of Fern beauty, and with 

 the dusky wood beyond, is a considerable planting of 

 the North American Mocassin-flower {Cypripedium 

 spectabile), with its great pouched and winged flowers 

 of rose and white, and its fine pleated leaves of bright 

 fresh green. What a plant ! Its beauty almost takes 

 away one's breath. Any one who had never seen it 

 before, suddenly meeting it in such a place, with no 

 distractions of other flower-forms near, would think it 

 was some brilliant stove Orchid escaped into the wild. 

 It loves to throw its long cord-like roots out into black 

 peaty mud, when they will grow strong and interlace 

 into a kind of vegetable rook's-nest. Every year the 

 tufts will become stronger and send up still nobler 

 spikes of leaf and bloom. 



Such a sight seems to give the mind a kind of full 

 meal of enjoyment of flower beauty, and it is well that 

 following it there shall be some plant of quite another 

 class. So the next boggy patch has another American 

 plant of a very different form, the curious Sarracenia 

 purpurea ; a weird, half-hooded trumpet of a thing, of 

 a dull-green colour, closely veined with red purple, 

 and near it, in striking contrast to its mysterious 

 aspect, the frank and pure-looking Grass of Parnassus 

 {Parnassia palustris), with its white bloom daintily 

 veined with green and its pretty pearl-like buds. Near 



