WILD GARDENSJ 



and unfailing interest year after year. What we get 

 from them will depend on what we take to them. 

 Flowers are nothing away from their haunts. 

 We must have the field in which the clover blos- 

 somed bees and all, the cranberry-bog, the mossy 

 bank of the violet, the white birch on which the 

 polyporus grew. Take, for example, the clintonia, 

 solitary amidst fallen spruce logs on the mountain 

 slope. Imagine it transferred to a trim garden ! 

 If you have really seen that flower of the solitudes, 

 you have seen the mossy rock overhanging it, the 

 spruce cones lying thick about ; sniffed the balsam 

 and heard the veery on the mountain. Or con- 

 sider this mountain sheep pasture with its clumps 

 of stunted spruce and balsam, its scattered boulders 

 and patches of sensitive fern, its reddening sorrel 

 and running cinquefoil ; bluets lie over the ground 

 like a light fall of snow; pasture stones are 

 incrusted with parmelias and set in a frame of 

 hair-cap moss and reindeer lichens, incomparable 

 mosaics; wild strawberries nestle among dainty 

 speedwells, half hidden under the bent grass. It is 

 a whole, an homogeneous piece of work, like a 

 tapestry. There is not a bog-rush nor a buttercup 

 to be spared. 



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