The bog garden consists merely of very wet ground in which a host of interesting plants flourish. It must, of course, be beside a pond or along a stream. In spring the brown woolly fronds of cinnamon fern will first show themselves, uncoiling as they rise. The swamp rose-mallow (Hibiscus moscheutos) will give a wealth of great white or pink flowers in mid-summer. In autumn blue mists of asters or a yellow glow of coreopsis and dazzling shafts of cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis) will brighten the spot.

HANDLING CUT FLOWERS

Water-lilies do well as cut flowers if they are properly handled. The flower selected for cutting must be newly opened or just about to open. In nature the life of each bloom is limited to three or four days, but in the house it may keep a day or two longer. Occasionally death seems to overtake the motor centres while the flower is still open, and then it remains several days before the petals wither.

The new flower may be recognised by these features: (I) The stamens spread apart at the centre of the flower, leaving a free passage down to the stigma; (2) the anthers are plump and round and have not yet begun to shed any pollen; (3) the basin-like stigma is filled with liquid excreted from its surface.

The flower stalk is scarcely able to supply the petals with water; the cut flower should be floated in a dish or, if placed in a vase, the vase should be full to the brim with water, the flower projecting as little as possible. When carried from the sunny garden into the house the flower is likely to close, on account of the diminished light, but it will open again next morning as well as if it were outside.

It is in the treatment of the margin that we make or mar a pond’s natural beauty. There is no one way in which native waters always meet the land, but there are some ways in which they never do. Nature never made broad borders of concrete or brick or hewn stone. Therefore avoid these in making a water garden. Rough stone walls are permissible at inlet and outlet only and even here they may be avoided if clayey soil can be had, provided the bank can be made proof against crawfish, which is most important. And in place of stones there will spring up beds of moisture-loving mosses, liverworts, and smooth sheets of Pellaea, whose delicate fruit-stalks shoot up in the first warm days of spring.

Beside the pond itself a path of gravel will enable us to come close to the water’s edge. Now we must bend away from the water and around the bog garden; now we cross It on a stone causeway or rustic bridge.

All around the grass and flowers run right out to the water’s edge. This is the essential point, and perfectly easy to attain. The water-tight construction of the bottom of the pond only needs to come up to the height of the desired water level. From this point a grassy bank may be raised as steep and high as one desires. Four to six inches above mean water level is high enough.

We can hide the junction of land and water completely by means of water-clover (Marsilia). This curious fern-plant, with leaves like a four-leaved clover, grows equally well in the wet edge of the sod or in the pond to a depth of eighteen inches. In the former situation the leaves stand up three or four inches, in the latter they float.