60 



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Steeam Garden. 



The bog garden, stream garden, lake or pond garden are species of 

 wild gardens, and any one or more of these may, where circumstances 

 favour it, most advantageously form part of one. 



If the smallest streamlet, by diversion or otherwise, be available, 

 though only intermittently, it should be made prominent and available 

 in our wild garden, as by conducting it in Swiss or other simple fashion, 

 through a hollowed trunk, to fall into a pool near the pathway. 



I think of no aquatics, or bog plants, or Ferns comprised in our garden 

 flora which are unsuitable for the purpose in hand, for florists' flowers 

 find practically little or no place in the former. I need therefore say 

 nothing about the furnishing. 



But there is perhaps place — apropos of such water adjuncts to the 

 wild garden — for an observation which I would also make in regard to 

 the wild garden proper : that I should think it a mistake to exclude 

 from either, in reasonable quantities, the wild plants, whether of land or 

 water, of the neighbourhood. 



One often hears it said that the garden, however natural, may well 

 exclude such plants as are naturally found just outside it, because they are 

 not wanted. But in wild gardens and natural stream gardens I think 

 such are at least in no way amiss, and are indeed even wanted for the 

 purpose of insensibly blending nature within with nature outside the 

 garden. 



Nowhere can more beautiful plant-pictures be made and planted 

 than by the waterside. I think perhaps the most striking effect I ever 

 saw in my life was the mass of self-sown Primula rosea, by the waterside 

 at Joldwynds (the late Sir Wm. Bowman's) ; and it is hard to conceive 

 of aught at once so easy to produce, or more beautiful in the way of 

 large summer efiect, than a bog or space by the waterside filled with 

 feathery masses of the better Spireas, associated perhaps with waterside 

 Iris, yellow and purple. 



Needless to say, both as regards these waterside plantings as well as 

 all other plantings in the wild garden (though one sees no rule so often 

 offended against), nothing like a border, in the gardening sense, should 

 -be seem Now and again thorough preparation of the soil may be, in places, 

 as necessary in the wild garden as elsewhere. But if such prepared spaces 

 look like flower borders of rude outline for a time, the impression should 

 be promptly and permanently destroyed by carrying the furnishing quite 

 to the edge, and, if need be, wholly surfacing the soil between with 

 perennial undergrowth. 



I am painfully conscious as I write that a paper like this must, from 

 the nature of its subject, be conspicuously inadequate for its purpose, and 

 can only at the best be suggestive. How could it be otherwise (I am 

 comforted by remembering) when under the term "a wild garden" are 

 , included, and justly included, planted places as different from each other 

 as eight acres of woodland loveliness on the one hand, and half a rood of 

 pretty and studied natural wild planting, within a garden, upon the 

 other? 



