CHAPTER XIII 



BULBS, TUBEROUS PLANTS AND ORNAMENTAL GRASSES 



HERE are plants for every place and purpose beauty 

 for formal beds and borders, for the water garden, the 

 rockery, the meadows, the woodland, and especially for 

 the wild spots on our grounds, for wherever we would impose our 

 ideals upon the land we control. Let us not be restrained by 

 the definitions of the classifiers. The botanist would perhaps 

 name a tulip as the most familiar example of a bulb, being "built 

 up of a series of fleshy scales." He will tell you that the gladiolus 

 grows from a corm, the canna from a tuber, and the iris from a 

 rhizome, and has pity in his eye for you if you refer to any one of 

 these as a root. But to the flower-lover, plants that store up in 

 a bulb or any of these fleshy "roots" during one growing season 

 the food that is to last them well through the next season of bloom, 

 are a class by themselves, sufficiently distinct, in his mind at least, 

 for all practical purposes. 



Because they have so much latent beauty stored when we 

 receive them from the dealer, and are so little dependent, at first, 

 upon the expert skill of a gardener, bulbs of one kind or another 

 are grown by every one. Some are of the simplest culture; some 

 cost as little as three for a cent; some are among the most costly 

 indulgences of specialists; others are more popular than any other 

 plants in the trade. 



Probably there will never again be a feverish craze for tulips 

 such as once attacked the phlegmatic Dutch ; certainly Americans 

 are not wont to weigh gold in the balance for a Semper Augustus 



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