A New Gardening Hobby for Americans— By Henry Maxwell, 



Conn- 

 ecticut 



THREE WONDERFUL DISCOVERIES THAT ENABLE US TO TRANSFORM BAD-SMELLING, UNHEALTHFUL, MOSQUITO-INFESTED 

 BOGS INTO GLORIOUS GARDENS FILLED WITH ORCHIDS, INSECT-CATCHING PLANTS, AND OTHER INTERESTING FLOWERS 



BOG GARDENING is a familiar phrase 

 in England that suggests only de- 

 lightful possibilities, but in America it may 

 sound ridiculous enough. Yet this article 

 will describe six new kinds of gardens that 

 can be made at small expense out of un- 

 healthful, disagreeable or worthless bits of 

 lowland which are now merely breeding 

 places for mosquitoes. 



Two of these gardens will contain fascinat- 

 ing orchids and insectivorous plants that 

 cannot be grown in any other way; one will 

 contain thousands upon thousands of cardinal 

 flowers and fringed gentians in unbroken 

 sheets; another will have some of the most 

 gorgeous flowers in the world, such as 

 Japanese iris: one will appeal to the collector 

 and suburban hobby-rider; and the last will 

 be a very cheap and wholly American garden 

 such as any rural community can afford to 

 have, instead of reducing the countryside 

 to an ugly monotony by filling low areas in 

 the crusade against mosquitoes. 

 | All this has been made possible by three 

 great discoveries, the most electrifying of 

 which is that malarial fever is spread only 

 by mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles, which 

 ■can be destroyed by oil sprays and by drain- 

 ing the marshes. The world has been entire- 

 ly mistaken all these centuries in supposing 

 that it is bad air or an exhalation from 

 swamps which causes chills and fever. 

 Moreover, it is only at night that the malarial 

 mosquitoes are active. Thus, swamps have 



been robbed of their terrors, and bog gar- 

 dens can no longer be considered unhealthful. 



Another revolutionary discovery was made 

 by Dr. George V. Moore, who has shown 

 that the bad-looking and bad-smelling 

 "scum" of stagnant water can be destroyed 

 with marvelous ease and cheapness by the 

 use of copper sulphate. City reservoirs of 

 drinking water can be cleaned simply by 

 trailing a bag of copper sulphate behind a 

 rowboat; lakes can be cleaned without kill- 

 ing the fish, and bulletins of the United States 

 Department of Agriculture tell just how to 

 do it. Exit the bad smell. 



The third discovery was made by the new 

 science, ecology, which studies plants out- 

 doors in their life relations to one another, 

 instead of merely describing species or cutting 

 up plants and studying them under a micro- 

 scope. Ecology has shown that there are 

 two totally different kinds of bog, each with 

 wonderful peculiarities and possibilities. The 

 more exciting kind is the sphagnum bog, 

 because it is the only place in which we may 

 grow pitcher plants and other weirdly beauti- 

 ful insect-catchers, as well as the Arethusa, 

 Calypso and other elusive orchids. The 

 less exciting kind is the common muck 

 swamp which can be glorified by great 

 colonies of cardinal flower, fringed gentian, 

 forget-me-nots, bee balm, purple loose strife 

 and Lilium superbum. 



"The sphagnum bog," says an American 

 enthusiast, "is the cleanest and healthiest 



kind of wet place there is, for it is a singular 

 fact that its waters contain no bacteria. Not 

 only is there a complete absence of the ordin- 

 ary organisms of decay, but the waters are 

 strongly antiseptic. This explains why oak 

 and other trees that have fallen into such bogs 

 have been preserved for many centuries. 

 It also explains why sphagnum bogs furnish 

 the best peat for burning and for horticultural 

 purposes, because the best peat — true peat — 

 is soil in which the plant forms are still clearly 

 visible, whereas in muck the germs of decay 

 have destroyed all trace of vegetable 

 structure. (Unluckily, most people do not 

 understand this obvious and all-important 

 distinction. Muck is cheap; good fibrous 

 peat costs money.) Swamp peat, when 

 burned, yields a great deal of ash ; sphagnum 

 peat, very little. 



"Another astonishing fact about a sphag- 

 num bog is that it is poor in plant food, while 

 the common swamp is rich. Both kinds 

 have luxuriant vegetation, and the ordinary 

 muck swamp, when drained and sweetened 

 by the use of lime, becomes good land for 

 leafy crops, such as celery and lettuce, which 

 need plenty of nitrogen. But the sphagnum 

 bog is very poor in nitrogen, and that is why 

 the pitcher plants, Venus's flytrap, sundew, 

 and butterwort have to get their nitrogen in 

 the form of proteids, by capturing insects. 



"This poverty in nitrogen also explains 

 why nobody ever succeeds in growing most of 

 our hardy native orchids. The bog-loving 



For flie orchid bog garden — the Pogonia. Will grow only in sphagnum 



342 



For the insectivorous bog garden — a sundew. {Drosera roiundifolia) 



