268 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 



that you have to be very careful how you introduce it. 

 Not a Spiraea in the whole garden but shrieks piteously 

 in the neighbourhood of that relentless vermilion; 

 the Panther Lily turns acrid, and the orange of Senecio 

 Clivorum completes a chord almost too powerful for 

 endurance. The only other Lobelia of importance — for 

 radicans has turned out unable to bear our sunless 

 summers, and grows perpetually without flowering^ — 

 is the queer little aquatic Dortmanna. Lobelia Dort- 

 manna inhabits mountain lakes in northern England, 

 Wales, and Scotland, growing, like any Chara, right at 

 the bottom of the water, making its little tuft of fat, 

 linear, blunt-ended leaves under four feet or so of Alpine 

 tarn. Then, in summer, up through the ripple comes 

 the flower-stalk, and unfolds three or four large flowers 

 of very pale China blue, just above the surface of the 

 water. I first saw Dortmanna among the Welsh moun- 

 tains, in drying mud-flats beside a little lake, and, though 

 I confess I have never yet grown it, I see no reason at all 

 why it should not be as easy as it certainly is pretty. 

 As a rule, difficulty and ill-temper are not the prevailing 

 faults of aquatic plants. Rather the other way. 



There are one or two other cautions I would hint as to 

 planting the edge of your pond. Do not overdo the use 

 of Iris. The Irises, in their sword-like foliage, give you 

 a charm of the first order. Do not cheapen it by too 

 frequent use and repetition ; let us have one or two Iris 

 clumps, contrasting with the other, lusher leafage, rather 

 than weaken the effect of both by dotting Irises too 

 copiously along the shore. I would counsel three or four 

 clumps of sibirica, arranged in a row — sibirica is ex- 

 tremely decorative thus, in a row — and one sheaved mass 

 of Kaempferi, at a commanding, prominent point of the 

 edge ; while, of course, you will use, not more than once, 



^ This last winter, too, has finally cured it of even that good habit. 



