272 The American Flower Garden 



Among yuccas or ornamental grasses the flaming torches of the 

 red-hot poker plant flare most effectively. Isolate such a blaze 

 of colour if you would get the full value of its glory. Yellow, 

 orange, scarlet and coral flame flowers or torch flowers glow with 

 lambent fire in late summer and early autumn as if they would 

 set the fast-fading garden ablaze. 



One of the joyful possibilities in owning a pond or stream is 

 the ability to grow to perfection a variety of beautiful grasses and 

 sedges about its edge. The hardy bamboos, eulalia, reeds, 

 erianthus, and phalaris, taken from the flower garden, where they 

 invariably look out of place, and naturalised on the banks with 

 the choicer native grasses, reeds and sedges for congenial com- 

 pany, not only hold their own, but their increased vigour is encour- 

 aging. The feathery plumes of the Japanese eulalia especially 

 become a fresh revelation of grace. Wild rice, which should 

 be sown as soon as it ripens, will attract many birds to feast 

 bobolinks, red-winged blackbirds and wild ducks among the 

 throng. We are only beginning to realize the delightful uses of 

 the hardy bamboos in the background of the perennial border, in 

 the water garden, and for those tropical effects with pampas grasses 

 and other exotics without which no "head gardener for a first- 

 class gentleman" seems to be truly happy. Too long have we 

 regarded all the bamboo race as impossible denizens of warmer 

 climes. But there are at least a half-dozen hardy ones, among 

 them the little pygmy bamboo, for carpeting rock gardens and wild 

 places, and a broad-leaved, decorative bamboo (Bambusa Metake), 

 the best of all, which grows higher than a man's head. Whoever 

 wishes to achieve the effect of a gigantic ribbon grass will grow 

 Fortune's bamboo along with the "gardener's garters," a varie- 

 gated phalaris, and the striped or barred eulalias from Japan, but 



