Title: American gardening
Identifier: americangardeni131892newy (find matches)
Year: 1892 (1890s)
Authors:
Subjects: Gardening; Horticulture
Publisher: New York : Rural Pub. Co
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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TER ON GARDEN EXILES. 'HERE is a group of vagrant plants that have always ap- pealed to my heart. They have, for the most part, long been exiled from the society of really cultivated garden favor- ites, although now and then some loving soul, who knows no fashion in her floriculture, still harbors in her garden bor- ders some of these flower- tramps. With quiet, unpretentious persistence they man- age to find root-room and to pick up a living in odd nooks and waste spots of earth not claimed by other vegetation. Some of them you find growing and blooming, without the least protestation, outside the garden fence, where they've fallen after being uprooted from the home of years. "Escaped from cultivation" the botany says of most of the individual species of this group of homely flowers, but they are still domestic enough to follow in the wake of man's steps. In driving over the beautiful old road that leads from Cambridge to Concord, the very road which the British soldiers trod on that famous nineteenth of April, one finds growing by the wayside several of these old friends. Indeed, it has occurred to me that, were all other marks of the road swept away save these old garden flowers and herbs, one might still trace out its course. Tansy grows luxuriantly in many places, both inside and outside the stone walls, and toad-flax, the " butter-and-eggs " of our childhood, not infrequently is seen. Here and there are stray beds of the old yellow lilies (Hcmcrocallisfulva), and solitary tiger-lilies that, of late years, are becoming wanderers. Scattered along this road almost as abundantly as the tansy is that homely member of the pink family popu- larly known as bouncing-bet. I wonder who gave name to this outcast, once a cherished inmate of the garden, and why. There is nothing rollicking about her air. Perhaps in better days, when she had a real place of her own in the flower-bed, she was wont to stray beyond her limits and trespass on her neighbors' allotted space, or step out into the path and there try to plant her roots and seeds. Bouncing Betty," I've now and then heard her called by gentle old ladies, who abhorred nicknames, even for plants, and in Salem, Massachusetts" old-maids' pinks" is the popular name for the well-known blossoms. Looking up the history of bouncing-bet, we find from the botany only that it is adventive from Europe and common along roadsides. Imagination must fill up the long blank between the tender transp 1 a n t i n g to early colonial gar- dens of many hardy perennials brought across the Atlantic, and their gradual removal from neat borders to any poor bit of earth that would support plant life. The bouncmg-bet is still kept in some old - fashioned gar- dens, particularly in the western states, where, as yet, it has not taken to Bohe- mian life so much as in New England. My grand mother used to gather bunches of the loose corymbs of pale flowers and with them fill her gaily painted old China vases, but I have never elsewhere seen it given such household honor, though it is cousin to our sweet garden ks and to the va- is wild and culti- FiG. 3.—Spiranthes cer.nua. vated silenes. The See "Our Native Orchids." flowers of the sapcE-
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