WALL PLANTS 



It may be objected that, as in the wild garden the 

 handiwork of man should be conspicuous by its absence, 

 the consideration of plants useful for the embellishment 

 of walls is needless. Walls may, however, occur in the 

 approaches to the wild garden, and, where this is the 

 case, every endeavour should be made to modify their 

 original unattractiveness by clothing them with plant 

 life. Walls may be rendered objects of beauty instead 

 of eyesores. Nature gives us proof of this again and 

 again. Here she faces a wall with countless upright, 

 yellow-white spikes of navelwort rising from flat rosettes 

 of rounded leaves, here she drapes the surface with the 

 lilac flower-trails of mother-of-thousands, here crimson- 

 leaved herb-Robert and fumitory paint the wall with 

 red and yellow. Nature works wonders with her self- 

 sown seedlings, perfecting her plants in the most 

 unexpected and often apparently impossible spots. From 

 the dry wall her Chimney Campanulas rise robustly with 

 crowded stems five feet or more in height ; from the 

 narrow chink between the country station wall and the 

 paved platform, down which one can hardly pass a knife- 

 blade, rise strong plants of Valerian a yard in height ; 

 and from mortar not five years old seedlings of shrubby 

 Veronicas push a few inches of growth. Man may 

 often be discouraged in comparing his ill-fortune with 

 Nature's apparently never-failing success. He has sown 

 in carefully-prepared soil a packet of seed, out of which, 

 perhaps, scarcely one has germinated. Nature's seed 

 thrown on a rock or into the midst of weeds flourishes 



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