The six-angled stonecrop OS. sexangulare). showing the soft cushiony fohage and yellow flowers. An example of the terete, or cylindrical-leaved group 



The 'Fun' of Collecting Stonecrops, II — By wilhelm Milie 



MOSSY, EVERGREEN PLANTS THAT ANY ONE CAN GROW IN ANY SOIL— INVALUABLE FOR EDGING 

 PATHS, CARPETING ROSEBEDS, ROCK GARDENS, WALLS, SANDY SOIL, AND FOR WINTER BEAUTY 



New 

 1, York 



"\T7HEN I wrote Sedum for Bailey's 

 * * " Cyclopedia of American Horticul- 

 ture" in 1900, I knew as much about 

 stonecrops as a blind man knows about 

 color. Witness this banal bit of sopho- 

 moric humor; "Sedums are plants for 

 poor folks. The chief points against them 

 are that they have never been fashionable 

 and anybody can grow them." It 

 is true that sedums are cheap, that 

 any one can grow them, and that you some- 

 times see a tin can filled with Sedum acre 

 in a tenement window. But fashionable! 

 There is not a king in Europe who does 

 not have sedums in his garden. The 

 list of beauties I saw in England is so long 

 that it makes my head ache to think of 

 the miserable thirty-nine species I for- 

 merly described from Masters' respectable 

 monograph and from the most unimpeach- 

 able dead plants! 



The standard works on gardening de- 

 scribe faithfully everything that is unim- 

 portant about sedums and are absolutely 

 dumb about their peculiar beauties and 

 roses. There are three main types of 

 beauty in the genus — the robust, creeping 

 and mossy — the first two of which were 

 treated last month in The Garden 

 Magazine. 



The mossy sedums grow only one to 



four inches high, have diminutive flowers 

 between May and July, and make ex- 

 quisite carpets of evergreen foliage which 

 is particularly attractive in winter, when 

 some of them take on bronze tones. These 

 are the ones which I should like to put 

 in every garden in the land, because they 

 can destroy more ugliness and create more 

 beauty than any plants of their size I 

 know. And, in particular they can per- 

 form four great services for America. 



1. They can turn great stretches of sand 

 and rock into carpets of living beauty. 

 For example, the wall pepper, will grow in 

 the poorest soil, even gravel, or on rocky 

 land where there is hardly an inch of earth. 

 In June and July it will give great patches 

 of yellow flowers. And in the winter it 

 will cover naked and ugly wastes with an 

 evergreen carpet, which is most comforting 

 to the eye for three or four months when the 

 grass is dead. 



2. They will carpet rose and bulb beds, 

 furnishing a better background for the 

 flowers than dirt, and more winter beauty 

 than manure or litter. They are so shal- 

 low-rooted that they do not rob the other 

 flowers of much plant food or moisture. 

 Fancy your daffodils rising out of an 

 evergreen carpet in spring! Imagine the 

 bulb beds beneath your window clothed 



15 



with a living green turf instead of dead 

 yellow straw! And how much better your 

 rose beds would look at all times of the 

 year! 



3. They will solve the great problem of the 

 American rock garden. There are thous- 

 ands of lovely rock gardens in England; 

 why are there none here? Because our 

 summer climate is hot and dry. Yet these 

 sedums have been adapted by nature to 

 endure just such conditions. They will 

 grow in a pinch of soil on rocks that are 

 so hot you can hardly touch your hand 

 to them. Moreover these sedums do not 

 look like cacti and other desert plants — 

 thin and scraggly or else gross and pulpy. 

 They have the genuine alpine charm. 



4. They will remove some of the new 

 look from gardens, and give in one year 

 some of the mellowness which age alone 

 is supposed to bring. You can plant 

 sedums in the stone steps that descend 

 to the garden, in the brick walks, in low 

 retaining walls built without mortar, and 

 on the top of the garden wall, where a 

 brick may be left out of the inner row 

 occasionally for the purpose of crowning 

 the wall with flowers. In a climate like 

 ours, that is not favorable to lichens and 

 mosses, how much it means to be able 

 to place the finishing touch that softens. 



