CHAPTER XXI. 



THE BOG GARDEN. 



THE bog garden is a home for the numerous children of the wild 

 that will not thrive on our harsh, bare, and dry garden borders, but 

 thrive cushioned on moss or in moist peat soil. Many beautiful 

 plants, like the Wind Gentian and Creeping Harebell, grow on our 

 own bogs and marshes, much as these are now encroached upon. 

 But even those who know our own bogs have, as a rule, little notion 

 of the multitude of charming plants, natives of northern and 

 temperate countries, whose home is the open marsh or bog. In 

 our own country we have been so long encroaching upon the 

 bogs and wastes that some of us come to regard bogs and wastes 

 as exceptional tracts all over the world, but when we travel in 

 new countries in northern climes we soon learn what a vast extent 

 of the world's surface was once covered with bogs. In North 

 America, even by the margins of the railways, one sees, day after 

 day, the vivid blooms of the Cardinal-flower springing erect from the 

 wet peaty hollows ; and far under the shady woods stretch the black 

 bog pools, the ground between being so shaky that you move a few 

 steps with difficulty. And where the woody vegetation disappears 

 the Pitcher-plant (Sarracenia), Golden Club (Orontium), Water Arum 

 (Calla palustris), and a host of other handsome bog plants cover 

 the ground for hundreds of acres, with perhaps an occasional slender 

 bush of Laurel Magnolia (Magnolia glauca) among them. In some 

 parts of Canada, where the painfully long and straight roads are often 

 made through woody swamps, and where the few scattered and poor 

 habitations offer little to cheer the traveller, a lover of plants will find 

 beside the road conservatories of beauty in the ditches and pools 

 of black water fringed with a profusion of stately ferns, and bog and 

 water bushes. 



Southwards and seawards, the bog flowers, like the splendid 

 kinds of herbaceous Hibiscus, become tropical in size and brilliancy, 

 while far north and west and south along the mountains grows the 



