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
hardy1 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[33] 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
cultivation2 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[34] 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
foliage3, 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
remarkable4 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.
