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The American Flower Garden 



sweet bay (Magnolia glauca), the white azalea that fills the air 

 with a spicy fragrance as delicious as the clethra's, the black 

 alder whose dark twigs, stuck with red berries, make a cheerful 

 punctuation point in the autumn landscape, the elder, whose flat 

 white blossoms come with the wild roses, the shrubby cinquefoil, 

 the fuzzy pink steeple bush, the meadowsweet and the ninebark, 

 equally attractive in flower and in fruit, will not be missing from 

 the wild garden planted in moist ground. 



Indeed, a low lying piece of land affords more possibilities 

 of establishing colonies of plants that may be trusted to take almost 

 entire care of themselves than any other site. Here the monarda, 

 bee balm or Indian plume as it is variously called, will spread 

 rapidly and invite humming birds to feast every midsummer day 

 at the brimming wells of nectar in the ragged red tubes that are 

 stuck irregularly around its globes. Here, in late summer, the 

 vivid cardinal flower will continue their feast. Rose mallows 

 that look like single pink hollyhocks, tall, feathery, meadow rue, 

 superbum lilies, moccasin flowers, showy lady's slippers, the white 

 fringed orchid and other orchids, trilliums, spring beauty, turtle 

 head, and the blue fringed gentians, which may now, after long 

 experimenting, be grown from seed, are only a few of the many 

 native wild flowers that are happy where there is no possibility of 

 dying out. In such a place the Virgin's bower clematis will hang 

 fleecy festoons over the shrubbery and race with the bittersweet 

 and wild grape up the trees. Tufts of English primroses and 

 marsh marigolds and sheets of blue forget-me-nots delight to 

 spread along the banks of a brook where serried ranks of blue and 

 yellow irises and the pure white blossomed arrowhead stand with 

 their feet in the water. It was Thoreau who called a swamp 

 "Nature's sanctuary." Not until one enters it with an eye alert 



