WILD GARDENING 61 



to those who drive or ride they are a dream of beauty, because the 

 hedge banks are full of little flowers. The great lesson we should 

 learn from this is that we can and ought to make every foot of our 

 daily walk or drive from home to office or station as full of charm as any 

 equal distance in England. We can do it by adopting the methods 

 of wild gardening, which are quick, cheap, wholesale ways of get- 

 ting large, permanent results. But it would be wickedly expensive 

 and stupidly literal for us to throw up miles of earthen walls in a 

 country where fences are cheaper than hedges. Those earthen 

 walls in England, on which the hedges often stand, were made by 

 cheap labour centuries before the invention of wire fences, and it 

 would be poor economy to banish them now. On the other hand, 

 we should be aping England to copy this simply because we could 

 afford it. "Aping" any other country consists in copying her bad 

 features, or in copying good things with materials that were once 

 the cheapest but are now very costly. 



We need a wholly different type of beauty and we have it 

 already in the shrub-lined roadsides of New England. The only 

 important class of plants beside water-lilies in which we have a 

 climatic superiority to England is in shrubbery. The one thing 

 I missed most there was the succession of simple, homely bushes, 

 such as sumach, elder, bayberry, shad-bush, sweet fern, hazel, winter- 

 berry, and above all, our matchless variety of bushy dogwoods and 

 viburnums. These can be collected by the wagon load or gotten 

 by the car load from collectors of native plants at much lower rates 

 than nursery-grown material. 



If this particular plan does not suit your purse or locality, per- 

 haps you can find a method that will be satisfactory by consulting 

 the article on "Roadside Gardening," in the Garden Magazine 

 for July, 1908. 



