58 THE WILD GARDEN. 
mutilation, scraping away of leaves, and exposing on bare 
sloppy borders plants that in Nature shelter each other, and 
are shielded from bitter frost and burning heat by layers of 
fallen leaves, gradually sinking into excellent light surface 
soil for the young roots, are ignorant and brutal practices that 
must be given up by all who really look into the needs of our 
hardy garden flora. 
With reference to this point, I print this letter from an 
observer of what goes on in the woods of New England. 
Our own woods are full of lessons, and so it is in all countries. 
Mr. Falconer’s letter is very suggestive of the revolution in 
method which must be carried out in the gardens of the 
future :— 
I go into the woods in the spring time, and find them carpeted 
with Dog’s-tooth Violets, Wood Anemones, blue and purple Hepaticas, 
Spring beauty, Trilliums, Blood-root, Star-flowers, False Solomon’s 
Seal, Gold Thread, trailing Arbutus, wild Ginger, and a host of other 
pretty little flowers, all bright and gay, arising from their bed of 
decaying herbage and tree leaves, and many of them are in perfection, 
too, before a tree has spread a leaf; and thus they glow and revel in 
their cosy bed, fed and sheltered by their tree friends, When their petals 
drop and their leaves are mature, the trees expand their leafy canopy 
and save the little nurslings from the torture of a scorching sun, And 
early as the earliest, too, the outskirts of the woods and meadows with 
hosts of Violets are painted blue and white, and speckled everywhere 
with Bluets, or little Innocents, as the children call them. Woodsias, 
tiny Aspleniums, and other Ferns are unfolding their fronds along the 
chinks among the stones; the common Polypody is reaching over 
blocks and boulders ; and even the exposed rocks, with their rough 
and Lichen-bearded faces, are aglow in vernal pride. Every nook and 
cranny among them, and little mat of earth upon them are checkered 
with the flowery print of the Canada Columbine, the Virginia Saxifrage, 
and the glaucous Corydalis. But to the carpet. What can be prettier 
or more appropriate than the Partridge-berry (Mitchella repens), the 
Twin-flower (Linnea borealis—does well with us), Creeping Winter 
Green (Gaultheria procumbens), Bearberry (Arctostaphylos Uva-Ursi), 
