If with this water-garden we combine the wild garden of land plants - herbaceous, trailers, etc. - some of the loveliest effects possible in gardens will be produced. The margins of lakes and streams are happily not upturned by the spade in winter ; and hereabouts, just away from the water-line, almost any vigorous and really hardy flower of the thousands now in our gardens may be grown and will afterwards take care of itself. The Globe-flowers alone would form beautiful effects in such positions, and would endure as long as the Grass. Near the various Irises that love the water-side might be planted those that thrive in moist ground, and they are many, including the most beautiful kinds. Among recently introduced plants the singular Californian Saxifraga peltata is likely to prove a noble one for the water-side, its natural habitat being beside mountain watercourses, dry in the autumn when it is at rest; both flowers and foliage are effective, and the growth very vigorous when in moist ground. It would require a very long list to enumerate all the plants that would grow near the margins of water, and apart from the aquatics proper; but enough has been said to prove that, given a strip of ground beside a stream or lake, a garden of the most delightful kind could be tunned. The juxtaposition of plants inhabiting different situations - water-plants, waterside plants, and land-plants thriving in moist ground - would prevent what would, in many cases, be so undesirable - a general admixture of the whole. Two distinct classes of effects could be obtained, the beauty of the flowers seen close at hand, and that of the more conspicuous kinds in the distance, or from the other side of the water of a stream or lakelet.

Day Lily by margin of water.

An interesting point in favour of the wild garden is the succession of effects which it may afford, and which are suggested by the illustrations on the next pages, both showing a succession of life on the same spot of ground. In gardens in early summer at present the whole of the portion devoted to flower-gardening is dug up raw as a ploughed field, just when the earth is naturally most thickly strewn with flowers. A very little consideration and observation will suffice to make it clear that a succession of effects may be secured without this violent disfigurement of our gardens in the fairest days of early summer. These are not the days fur digging or planting either, and the system that necessitates them is pernicious in its effects on our gardens.

It is equally an enemy of all peace or rest for the gardener, who, having trenched, dug, enriched, planted, and sown, through the autumn, winter, and spring, might certainly begin to look for the fruits and flowers of his labour, when he has to face the most trying effort of all - the planting of the flower-garden in May and June with a host of flowers too lender to be committed to the earth at an earlier season;

The bog-garden is a home for the numerous children of the wild that will not thrive on our harsh, bare, and dry garden borders, but must be cushioned on moss, and associated with their own relatives in moist peat soil. Many beautiful plants, like the Wind Gentian and Creeping Harebell, grow on our own bogs and marshes, much as these are now encroached upon. But even those acquainted with the beauty of the plants of our own bogs have, as a rule, but a feeble notion of the multitude of charming plants, natives of northern and temperate countries, whose home is the open marsh or boggy wood. In our own country, we have been so long encroaching upon the bogs and wastes that some of us come to regard them as exceptional tracts all over the world. But when one travels in new countries in northern climes, one soon learns what a vast extent of the world's surface was at one time covered with bogs. In North America day after day, even by the margins of the railroads, one sees the vivid blooms of the Cardinal-flower springing erect from the wet peaty hollows. Far under the shady woods stretch the black bog-pools, the ground between being so shaky that you move a few steps with difficulty. One wonders how the trees exist with their roots in such a bath. And where the forest vegetation disappears the American Pitcher-plant (Sarracenia), Golden Club (Orontium), Water Arum (Calla palustris), and a host of other handsome and interesting bog-plants cover the ground for hundreds of acres, with perhaps an occasional slender bush of Laurel Magnolia (Magnolia glauca) among them. In some parts of Canada, where the painfully long and straight roads are often made through woody swamps, and where the few scattered and poor habitations offer little to cheer the traveller, lie will, if a lover of plants, find conservatories of beauty in the ditches and pools of black water beside the road, fringed with the sweet-scented Button -bush, with a profusion of stately ferns, and often filled with masses of the pretty Sagittarias.

Marsh Marigold and Iris in early spring. See p. 77.

The same spot as in opposite sketch, with aftergrowth of Iris, Meadow Sweet, and Bindweed. (See p. 77.

Southwards and seawards, the bog-flowers become tropical in size and brilliancy, as in the splendid kinds of herbaceous Hibiscus, while far north, and west and south along the mountains, the beautiful and showy Mocassin-flower (Cypri-pedium spectabile) grows the queen of the peat bog. Then in California, all along the Sierras, there are a number of delicate little annual plants growing in small mountain bogs long after the plains have become quite parched, and annual vegetation has quite disappeared from them. But who shall record the beauty and interest of the flowers of the wide-spreading marsh-lands of this globe of ours, from those of the vast wet woods of America, dark and brown, and hidden from the sunbeams, to those of the breezy uplands of the high Alps, far above the woods, where the little bogs teem with Nature's most brilliant flowers, joyous in the sun '. No one worthily; for many mountain-swamp regions are as yet as little known to us as those of the Himalaya, with their giant Primroses and many strange and lovely flowers. One thing, however, we may gather from our small experiences - that many plants commonly termed "alpine," and found on high mountains, are true bog-plants. This must be clear to anyone who has seen our pretty Bird's-eye Primrose in the wet mountain-side bogs of Westmoreland, or the Bavarian Gentian in the spongy soil by alpine rivulets, or the Gentianella (Gentiana acaulis) in the snow ooze.

Bogs are neither found or desired in or near our gardens now-a-days, but, wherever they are, there are many handsome flowers from other countries that will thrive in them as freely as in their native wastes.

Partridge Berry (Gualtheria).