TI2 The Wild Garden 



One wonders how the trees exist with their roots in such 

 a bath. And where the forest vegetation disappears 

 the American Pitcher-plant (Sarracenia), Golden Club 

 (Orontium), Water Arum (Calla palustris), and a host 

 of other handsome and interesting bog-plants cover the 

 ground for hundreds of acres, with perhaps an occasional 

 slender bush of the swamp Magnolia (M. glauca) among 

 them. In some parts of Canada, where the painfully 

 straight roads are often made through woody swamps, 

 and where the few poor ' houses ' offer little to cheer 

 the traveller, he will, if a lover of plants, find con- 

 servatories of beauty in the ditches and pools of dark 

 water beside the roads, fringed with a profusion of 

 stately ferns, and often filled with masses of the pretty 

 arrow-head. 



Southwards and seawards, the bog-flowers become 

 tropical in size and brilliancy, as in the splendid 

 herbaceous Hibiscus, while far north, and west and 

 south along the mountains, the beautiful Mocassin- 

 flower (Cypripedium spectabile) grows the queen of the 

 peat waste. Then in California, all along the Sierras, 

 there are a number of delicate little annual plants grow- 

 ing in small mountain bogs long after the plains have 

 become quite parched, and flowers have quite gone from 

 them. But who shall tell of the beauty of the flowers 

 of the marsh-lands of this globe of ours, from those of 

 the vast bog wastes of America, to those of the breezy 

 uplands of the high Alps, far above the woods, where 

 the mountain bogs teem with Nature's most brilliant 



