202 HARDY PERENNIALS 
Trillium. — The Trilliums or Wood Lilies are such 
delightful, endearing little flowers that one feels 
there must be some very definite reason why we so 
infrequently see them looking really happy in 
gardens. 
The puzzle is solved when once a really flourishing 
colony is seen and the environment and conditions 
compared with those generally existing in the 
average garden. 
It will with almost unfailing certainty be found 
that the really flourishing colony is located in some 
shaded dell where the soil is a soft bed of rotted 
leaves in which the foot sinks as easily as one's 
head is embedded in the depths of a downy cushion, 
and we shall find that the actual roots are deep 
down in the cool moisture of that bed, the stems 
rising through the soft, yielding leaf-mould perhaps 
a foot or more before daylight bids the leaves unfold. 
How different the conditions of the ordinary garden 
border ; where, if planted an inch or two beneath 
the surface, the roots are scorched and parched in 
Summer, and if planted deeply the close hard-setting 
soil above make the struggle upward to daylight too 
severe. We must come to the conclusion that the 
Wood Lily, chaste and charming, must either be 
reserved for the woodland garden or that it must 
be provided with a suitable leaf-bed in the coolest 
part of the garden under the grateful shade of a 
kindly tree. In such homes we may make the 
most of T. grandiflorum and its varieties, and all the 
