Hardy Exotic Flowering Plants 177 



there is rich vegetable soil the fine American lilies will do. 

 The European lilies, dotted in the grass in the rough unmown 

 glades, would not grow nearly so large as they do in the 

 rich borders of our cottage gardens; but the effect of the 

 single large blooms of the orange lily just level with the tops 

 of the grass, in early summer, where it grows wild, is as good 

 as any effect it gives in gardens. Along the bed of small 

 rivulets, in the bottom of narrow gorges densely shaded by 

 great Pines, Arbutus trees 60 feet high, and handsome 

 evergreen oaks on the Sierras of California, I saw in 

 autumn numbers of lily stems 7, 8, and 9 feet high, so 

 one could imagine what pictures the flowers formed in early 

 summer. No mode of cultivating lilies in gardens is equal 

 to that of dotting them through beds of rhododendrons 

 and other American plants usually planted in peat, the soil 

 of these beds, usually and very unwisely left to the rhododen- 

 drons alone, being peculiarly suited to the majority of the 

 lily tribe. As for Lilies in the wild garden, Mr. G. F. 

 Wilson sent me a stem of Lilium superbum, grown in 

 a rich woody bottom, ii^ feet high; this fine lily — the swamp 

 lily of North America — should be planted in rich boggy 

 bottoms where these occur in the wild garden. 



Snovpflake, Leucojum. — I have rarely seen anything more 

 beautiful than a colony of the summer Snowflake on the 

 margin of a tuft of rhododendrons at Longleat. Some of the 

 flowers were on stems nearly 3 feet high, the partial shelter 

 of the bushes and good soil causing the plants to be 

 unusually vigorous. Both the spring and -summer Snow- 

 flakes (L. vernum and L. aestivum) are valuable plants for 

 wild grassy places, and the last grows freely in the good soil 

 in the islets in the Thames near Wargrave. 



Gentian Lithosperm, Lithospermum prostratum. — A very 



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