CHAPTER VIII 

 PEAT GARDENS 



How we can transform every bad-smelling, malaria-breeding, 

 mosquito-haunted swamp into a healthful spot of unique 

 beauty no objection possible to bog gardens 



COME now, gentle reader, confess that you are prejudiced 

 against this subject. The word "swamp" makes you 

 think of chills and fever, snakes, green scum, mosquitoes, 

 miasma, frogs, and all unpleasantness. If you have any other feel- 

 ing you must be either a great traveller and a great reader, or an 

 exceptional student of nature and gardening. The only attitude 

 an "honest person" has toward wet places is to wish them all 

 drained and filled with soil. 



Drain them? Yes; but fill them, no! Draining alone will 

 usually solve the health problem by exterminating the mosquitoes 

 and, consequently, the malaria. But to fill low spots is often sheer 

 waste. Many of the most gorgeous and interesting flowers in the 



*( 



world grow only in damp ground. To dump in soil is to destroy 

 all possibility of enjoying a unique type of beauty. The city 

 engineer and the real estate dealer often have to fill in such places, 

 and country gentlemen unconsciously imitate their example. 

 But grading is very costly. Why not take the money you expected 

 to spend in filling a ravine or bit of damp woods and make a peat 

 garden the sort of thing pictured in this chapter? 



Yet these illustrations do not show a thousandth part of the 

 beauty of English "bog gardens." That phrase, however, I can- 



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