8o PEAT GARDENS 



worts, the pitcher plants and Venus's fly-trap. Of course, you can 

 grow them in greenhouses, where you can watch them capture and 

 devour flies and other creatures, but it is a pity to forego their 

 magical environment. These plants cannot be well grown with- 

 out sphagnum moss. I was pleased to see our Northern pitcher 

 plant (Sarracenia purpurea) in Sir Henry Yorke's bog garden, but 

 he did not then have the showiest of the whole group of insec- 

 tivorous plants, viz., Sarracenia flava. This is a native of the south- 

 ern United States, yet Mr. Warren H. Manning once showed me 

 some splendid colonies of it in his Massachusetts bog garden. 

 The fly-trap is the most wonderful of all, for it claps its claws 

 together and kills an insect before your very eyes. All these plants 

 are now available from regular nurserymen, so that there is no 

 excuse for robbing nature. 



"But," you may exclaim, "I do not have any peaty soil or 

 any sphagnum. What can I do?" Several things. If you want 

 the finest kind of bog garden, do as Mr. Manning did buy a 

 sphagnum swamp, such as you can find in New England on wooded 

 and hilly land suitable for summer homes, but costing only ten 

 dollars to twenty dollars an acre. Or, buy a car load of peat, and 

 sphagnum in any quantity you like, and make an artificial bog, 

 taking for your guide Robinson's "English Flower Garden." 

 If these methods are too costly, you can fall back upon the 

 plants that can be grown in ordinary muck. By "muck" I mean 

 soil in which you cannot see vegetable fibre as you do in peat. 

 Let us see, then, if there are any showy plants that will grow 

 in soil of any kind which is damp all the year or for a large 

 part of it. 



Showy? I should think so! In May you could have great 

 clumps of Siberian iris bearing dozens of blue flowers four inches 



