The Water Garden 115 



artificiality in a naturalistic picture as a concrete curb. Nor may 

 the man who merely pays indulge a fancy for little dumpy islands 

 that would give an effect something like a fly-specked looking-glass 

 to the mirror-like surface of the pond. One might think that 

 rhododendrons would look well anywhere, but perhaps no other 

 plant is so unsuited to small islands, which they seem to trans- 

 form into dumplings. 



Oftentimes the beauty of plants already growing about the , 

 site of a proposed pond should determine the shape of it. How 

 well worth while to let a little promontory jut out into the water 

 in order to save a fine clump of white birches backed by hemlocks; 

 to leave as an island, if the pond be large enough, the colony of 

 clethra and andromeda bushes where Maryland yellow-throats 

 have had their happy home for generations; to indent the shore 

 where the water of a little bay might refresh trilliums, spring 

 beauties, marsh marigolds, Virginia cowslip and royal fern 

 (Osmunda) that would certainly perish through too drastic drain- 

 ing. An indented shore line increases the apparent size of a pond, 1 

 besides affording more margin for planting. In any case, a flowing, 

 irregular outline is always preferable to the perfect ellipses and 

 circles suggesting geometry problems writ in water. 



One of the most delightful by-products of a pond to use 

 a commercial phrase may be a bog garden. "Nature's 

 sanctuary," it will be remembered, was Thoreau's name for the 

 swamp about Walden pond where he found some of her loveliest 

 treasures hidden. There is the ordinary bog of plain black muck, 

 semi-fluid and bottomless, yet not without its gifts of cardinal flower, 

 viburnum, silky dogwood, blue lobelia, Joe Pye weed, elm-leaved 

 goldenrod, convolvulus and hosts of other lovely wild shrubs and 

 flowers; but it is in the sphagnum bog, where for ages the moss 



