The Best New Idea in Gardening 



By WILHELM MILLER. Ph.D.. author of "What England Can Teach Us About Gardening," 

 editor of The Garden Magazine, horticultural editor of Country Life in America 



I HE greatest gardening idea invented during the nineteenth century is wild gardening, and William Robinson 

 should have been knighted for that joyous book of his— "The Wild Garden." Never since the time of Adam 

 and Eve has any idea about flowers possessed greater possibilities for human happiness. For wild gardening, 

 is not the mere cultivation of wild flowers ; it is a scheme for naturalizing the hardy flowers of every land in 

 I great self-supporting colonies, so that they will really look and act like wild flowers, requiring no care after 

 planting and multiplying year after year until they create visions of unprecedented beauty. How the old world has progressed 

 since Wordsworth wrote his immortal poem about the daffodils ! Possibly no one will ever write better lines than 



"Ten thousand saw I at a glance. 

 Tossing their heads in sprightly dance." 

 But the vision itself — the landscape picture — has been surpassed many times since then. At Gravetye, William Robinson planted 

 daffodil bulbs by the ton and poet's narcissus by the carload. In England it is a common thing to hear of country gentlemen 

 planting a million daffodils at a time— scattering stones out of a bag and wherever they fall planting bulbs. In America, Mr. 

 Samuel Untermyer has planted over a million narcissi at Greystone. New England hillsides, once bare in April, are now radiant 

 with myriads of yellow trumpets, while the meadows are starred in May with narcissi as numberless as the stars in the Milky 

 Way. And all this without watering, or staking, hoeing — or even harming the hay crop ! For in June, when you gather hay 

 from meadow or orchard, the bulbs have ripened their leaves, which fall flat and escape the mower. 



Consider the glorious floral pictures in 

 foreign lands which we can now make a 

 part of the American landscape ! Blue- 

 bells {Scilla nutans) carpet the ground 

 by the acre in England, and they will 

 here. A thousand bulbs cost $10 

 (only one cent each), and in a few years 

 they will multiply so that you can- 

 not step on the ground without crushing 

 the flowers. The exquisite wood hya- 

 cinth (Scilla campanulata) is equally 

 ravishing in beauty and practical for 

 planting. We can have lemon lilies by 

 the brook, and even the gorgeous red 

 Gesneriana tulip in the tall grass. "No 

 precedent for big red flowers in our 

 spring landscape, ' ' you say. What of it ! 

 The next generation will never know 

 that they are not native, for they will 

 self-sow or otherwise multiply in wild 

 places that are comfortable for them. 

 There was a time when the Snowdrop 



did not grow in Britain. Man planted it, and now you can see acres of run-wild snowdrops in Scotland. Nobody but a botanist 

 knows such things — or cares. We have an artistic right to naturalize anything that will require no care after planting. 



So, too, our country gentlemen have a chance to restore the beauty that the land had in the days of the red man. John Muir 

 tells us how each kind of wild flower used to grow by the acre in the Sacramento valley, and even now there are square miles of 

 California poppies. Around every city in America are thousands of shabby, uninteresting woodlots where cows, fires and grass 

 have driven out the wild flowers. Why not restore enchantment to these woods by planting dozens of Trilliums, and thousands 

 of dog's-tooth violets? Why not have great sheets of bloodroot in April, Canadian wood lilies in June, and Lilium superbum 

 in July? The wrong way is to dig these things in the spring, robbing nature and your neighbors. The right way is to buy all 

 these wild flowers from bulb dealers and nurserymen who propagate these plants in a legitimate way. 



And the best part of the whole story is that any one can create these new pictures ! You do not have to be wealthy. You 

 need not even own a bit of orchard, woodland or meadow. For every one may have a hardy border, and every one may adapt the 

 wild-gardening idea even to a city lot. In your shrubbery you can have clumps of daffodils or cottage tulips, and carpets of lily- 

 of-the-valley. Even if you have no long grass, you can have sweet blue flowers in March and April — scillas in the lawn and glory- 

 of-the-snow, which will not be harmed by the lawn-mower. And to the timidest and poorest I say : Try a few Darwin tulips in 

 in the garden. Although, in my opinion, they are too gardenesque for woods and meadows, they will help you realize the spirit 

 of wild gardening, because they will bloom year after year without the bother of annual digging. The main thing is to get the 

 spirit of wild gardening into the heart. The rest is comparatively easy ! 



Planting Table for Bulbs 



With the aims and principles expressed above I heartily agree, and it will give me peculiar pleasure to help any one realize 

 any wild-gardening scheme he has had in mind. I can save you much money and years of waiting. Take me into your confi- 

 dence, tell me what you would like to accomplish, and I will tell you whether it is practical and what it will cost. If you wish to 

 start wild gardening in a small way I recommend 1,000 bulbs of Narcissus poeticus, at a cost of — less than a cent a bulb I And 

 if you are planning to buy a million bulbs of any kind, the man to come to is— ARTHUR T. BODDINGTON. 



