PLANTS CHIEFLY FITTED FOR THE WILD GARDEN.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: The Giant Scabious (8 feet high).
(Cephalaria procera.)]
What first suggested the idea of the wild garden, and even the name
to me, was the desire to provide a home for a great number of exotic
plants that are unfitted for garden culture in the old sense. Many of
these plants have great beauty when in flower, and perhaps at other
seasons, but they are frequently so free and vigorous in growth that
they overrun and destroy all their more delicate neighbours. Many, too,
are so coarse that they are objectionable in choice borders, and after
flowering they leave a blank or a mass of unsightly stems. These plants
are unsightly in gardens, and the main cause of the neglect of hardy
flowers; yet many are beautiful at certain stages. A tall Harebell, for
example, stiffly tied up in a garden border, as has been the fashion
where plants of this kind have been grown at all, is at best of times
an unsightly object; but the same plant growing amongst the long
grass in a thin wood is lovely. The Golden–rods and Michaelmas Daisies
used to overrun the old mixed border, and were with it abolished.
But even the poorest of these seen together in a New England wood in
autumn form a picture. So also there are numerous exotic plants of
which the individual flowers may not be so striking, but which, grown
in groups and colonies, and seen at some little distance off, afford
beautiful aspects of vegetation, and quite new so far as gardens are
concerned. When I first wrote this book, not one of these plants was
in cultivation outside botanic gardens. It was even considered by the
best friends of hardy flowers a mistake to recommend one of them,
for they knew that it was the predominance of these weedy vigorous
subjects that made people give up hardy flowers for the sake of the
glare of bedding plants; therefore, the wild garden in the case of
these particular plants opens up to us a new world of infinite and
strange beauty. In it every plant vigorous enough not to require the
care of the cultivator or a choice place in the mixed border will
find a home. Of such plants there are numbers in every northern and
mountainous country, which travellers may gather and afterwards grow
in their own gardens. The taller Achilleas, the stately Aconites, the
seldom–seen Actæas, the huge and vigorous, but at certain seasons
handsome, Althæas, Angelica with its fine foliage, the herbaceous
kinds of Aralia from the American woods, also with fine foliage, the
Wormwood family (Artemisia), the stronger kinds of American cotton–weed
(Asclepias), certain of the vigorous species of Asparagus, Asters and
their allies in great variety, the larger and more vigorous species of
Astragalus, certain of the larger species of Betonica, pretty, and with
delicate flowers, but hardly fit for the mixed border, various free
and vigorous exotic Grasses, large and showy Bupthalmums, the handsome
creeping Bindweeds, too free in a garden, the most vigorous Campanulas,
exotic Thistles (Carduus) and their allies, the more remarkable kinds
of Carex, numerous Centaureas, somewhat too coarse for the garden; and
among other strong and hardy genera, the following are chiefly suitable
for the wild garden:
Crambe. Galega. Rhaponticum.
Digitalis. Helenium. Rheum.
Dipsacus. Helianthus. Rudbeckia.
Doronicum. Heracleum. Scolymus.
Echinacea. Inula. Senecio.
Echinops. Kitaibelia. Sida.
Elymus. Lavatera. Silphium.
Epilobium. Ligularia. Solidago.
Eryngium. Ligusticum. Sonchus.
Eupatorium. Mulgedium. Symphytum.
Euphorbia. Onopordon. Veratrum.
Ferula. Phytolacca. Verbascum.
Funkia. Polygonum. Vernonia.
[Illustration: Giant Cow Parsnip. Type of Great Siberian herbaceous
vegetation.
For rough places only.]