302 BOG PLANTS 



banks and in ravines and looks like a stranger from the tropics. 

 It generally grows about a foot high, with leaves twelve inches long 

 and one and a half to two inches wide. Few people know the 

 extraordinary number of fantastic forms to which the hart's 

 tongue has given rise in cultivation. A nursery firm at Sale, near 

 Manchester, which issues the largest fern catalogue in the world 

 (122 pages), offers sixty-two varieties of the hart's tongue, varying 

 in height from six inches to two feet and cut and crested in many 

 odd forms. But the original wild type is, of course, the most 

 precious for the bog garden. 



If there is anything in England that looks impossible to grow 

 in America it is this same hart's tongue fern. Imagine, therefore, 

 my astonishment on learning that it actually grows wild in the 

 United States, and thrives as far north as Vermont! In this 

 country it is a very rare plant, growing only on limestone rocks. 

 Some of our botanists call it Phyllitis Scolopendrium. Two 

 American nurserymen now offer the hart's tongue and I doubt 

 not their stock has been propagated in the nursery. It would be 

 scandalous to offer collected stock of so rare and precious a plant. 



EFFECTS WE CANNOT HAVE 



Our summers are too hot and dry for primroses. Near the 

 sea-shore the air is cool and moist enough, but we shall never have 

 primroses by the million in our woodlands, and we have no con- 

 ception of dozens of alpine species which English amateurs tuck 

 away in rock and bog gardens. One of the finest mass effects I 

 saw was a colony of Primula Japonica, about one hundred plants, 

 forming a ground cover under azaleas. It is hardy in our Northern 

 states, but I doubt if it would self-sow as it does in England. 

 Many of the primroses have piercing crimson and purple tones, 



