Music Welcome to snoozecast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep. Find us on snoozecast.com to learn more and connect with us. This episode is brought to you by Arbor Eatoms. Tonight we'll read from The Wild Garden by William Robinson, published in 1870. This episode first aired in 2021. Robinson was an Irish gardener and journalist whose ideas about wild gardening spurred the movement that led to the popularizing of the English cottage garden. He was a champion of the wild garden, who vanquished the high Victorian pattern garden of planted out bedding schemes which use tropical plants grown in greenhouses. Modern gardening practices first introduced by Robinson include using alpine plants in rock gardens, dense plantings of perennials and ground covers that expose no bare soil, use of hearty perennials and native plants, and large plantings of perennials in natural looking drifts. Get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your bed. Now take a few deep breaths. Plants chiefly fitted for the Wild Garden. But first suggested the idea of the Wild Garden, and even the name to me, was a 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 neighbors. 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 hearty flowers, yet many are beautiful at certain stages. A tall hair bell, 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 at times an unsightly object. But the same plant growing amongst the long grass in a thin wood is lovely. The golden rods and 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 hearty 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 travelers may gather and afterwards grow in their own gardens. There are bachous kinds of arelia from the American woods, with fine foliage, the warm wood family, the stronger kinds of American cottonweed, certain of the vigorous species of asparagus, asters, and their allies in great variety, certain of the larger species of botanica, pretty and with delicate flowers, but hardly fit for the mixed border. Various free and vigorous exotic grasses, the handsome creeping bindweeds, too free in the garden, the most vigorous, campanula, exotic fissiles, and their allies. The more remarkable kinds of carrex, somewhat too coarse for the garden, are chiefly suitable for the wild garden. The common shrubbery, woods, and woodland drives. It must not be thought that the wild garden can only be formed in places where there is some extent of rough pleasure ground. Excellent results may be obtained from the system in comparatively small gardens, on the fringes of shrubberies and marginal plantations, open spaces between trumps, the surface of beds of rhododendrons, where we may have plant beauty instead of garden graveyards. I call garden graveyards the Doug shrubbery borders, which one sees in nearly all gardens, public or private. Every shrubbery and plantation surface that is so needlessly and relentlessly dug over by the gardener every winter, may be embellished in the way I propose, as well as wild places. The custom of digging shrubbery borders prevails now in every garden, and there is in the whole course of gardening no worse or more profitless custom. When winter is once calm, almost every gardener, although animated with the best intentions, simply prepares to make war upon the roots of everything in his shrubbery border. The generally accepted practice is to trim and often to mutilate the shrubs, and to dig all over the surface that must be full of feeding roots. Delegate half-rooted shrubs are disturbed. Herbaceous plants are destroyed. Bulbs are displaced and injured. The roots as well as the tops of shrubs are mutilated. And a sparse, depopulated aspect is given to the margins, while the only improvement that is affected by the process is the annual darkening of the surface by the upturned earth. Illustrations of these bad practices occur by miles in our London parks and winter. Walk through any of them at that season and observe the borders around masses of shrubs, choice and otherwise. Instead of finding the earth covered or nearly covered, with vegetation close to the margin and each individual plant developed into something like a fair specimen of its kind, we find a spread of recently dug ground, and the plants upon it with an air of having recently suffered from a whirlwind or some calamity that necessitated the removal of mutilated branches. Rough pruners proceed the diggers and bravely trim in the shrubs for them so that nothing may be in the way. And then come the diggers, plunging their spades deeply about plants, shrubs, or trees. The first shower that occurs after this digging exposes a whole network of torn up roots. There is no relief to the spectacle. The same thing occurs everywhere in botanic gardens as well as in our large West End parks. And year after year is the process repeated. While such is the case, it will be impossible to have an agreeable or interesting margin to a shrubbery or plantation. What secrets one might have in the central hidden portions of these now dug and bare shrubberies? In the half shady spots, where little colonies of rare exotic wildlings might have their first introduction to our wild garden. Of course, all the labor required to produce this miserable result of dug borders is worse than thrown away, as the shrubub rays would do better if left alone. And by utilizing the power thus wasted, we might highly beautify the positions that are now so ugly. If we resolve that no annual maneuvering or digging is to be permitted. Nobody will grudge a thorough preparation at first. When a plantation of shrumps is quite young, it is well to keep the ground open by lightly stirring it for a year or two. Then the planting should be so arranged as to defeat the digger. To graduate the vegetation from the taller subjects behind to the very margin of the grass is of much importance, and this could be done best by the greater use of dwarf evergreens. Happily, there is quite enough of these to be had suitable for every soil. Light, moist, peety, or sandy soils, were such things as the sweet scented Daphne Neorum, known as Garland Flower, would spread forth its dwarf cushions, would be somewhat more desirable than, say, a stiff clay, but for every position suitable plants might be found. In one spot we might have a wide spreading tuft of the prostrate, savon, pushing its graceful evergreen branchlets out over the grass. In another, the dwarf little cottonesters might be allowed to form the front rank, relieved in their turn by pegged down roses and so on without end.

Herbaceous plants that die down in winter and leave the ground bare afterwards should not be assigned any important position near the front. Evergreen alpine plants and shrubs, as remarked before, are perfectly suitable here, but the true orbacious type and the larger bulbs like lilies should be in groups between spreading shrubs. By so placing them, we should not only secure a far more satisfactory general effect, but highly improve the aspect of their ambitious plants themselves. To carry out such planting properly, a little more time at first and a great deal more taste than are now employed would be required. But what a difference in the result. All that the well-covered borders would require would be an occasional weeding or thinning. And in the case of the more select spots, a little top dressing with fine soil.

Here and there, between and amongst the plants, such things as forketmi knots and violets, snow drops and sprimm roses might be scattered about, so as to give the borders interest even at the dollist's seasons.

And thus, we should be delivered from digging and dreariness and see our once ugly borders alive with flowers. The chief rule should be, never show the naked earth. Clothe it, and then allow the taller plants to rise in their own way through the turf or spray. Here is a little sketch of what is meant. A colony of the white arabis carpets the ground in which strong hardy lilies are growing and the lilies are pushing up their bold unfolding shoots.

The latter are none the worse in winter for this light carpet of foliage over the border, and then for a long time in spring, it is bedecked with white flowers. Mars. Indeed, in fairly good seasons, it blooms in winter too. It would take a big book to tell all the charms and merits belonging to the use of a variety of small plants to carpet the ground beneath and between those of larger growth. It need hardly be said that this argument against digging applies to two or three beds of shrubs and places where the shrubbery is little larger than the dining room as much just to the large country seat, public park, or botanic garden. There are great cultural advantages too in leaving the whole of the leaves to nourish the ground and protect it from frost or heat. When one or two species prevail in a given spot, in that way we may secure several important ends, distinct effects in different places, a variety as we walk along, and better means of meeting the wants of a plant. In as much as, dealing with a group or mass or carpet, we can best observe the result of our judgment and putting them in any soil or place. Therefore, although the quantity of vigorous, hearty flowers essential for making good

effects in a place of this size has not yet been planted out, some very charming effects have been obtained. Many are already planted, but will be some time before they show their full beauty. among them, Japanese and other honey suckles,

Virginia Creepers. before they show their full beauty. Among them, Japanese and other honey-suckles, Virginian creepers, climates, mysterious, and others. A part of the Arboretum is more particularly devoted to this kind of decoration, and will eventually form a very wild wood and wild garden, where the poets nor susses may be found among sweet briars, lilacs, and many kinds of fragrant flowering shrubs and vigorous perennials. While carrying out the scheme of wild gardening, pure and simple, that is to say, the naturalization of foreign hearty plants, opportunity has been taken to establish beautiful native kinds where they do not happen to be present in sufficient abundance. Thus, the lily of the valley has been brought in quantities and planted in widespread colonies along the drives, and so have the meadow saffron and the snowflakes and the daffodils. to group and scatter these in a natural and easy way, has required considerable care, the tendency of the men being invariably, and almost in spite of themselves, to plant in stiff and set or too regular masses. Few things are more delightful to anybody who cares about hearty plants than naturalizing the lily of the valley in pleasant spots about a country house. It is in every garden, of course, and very often so crowded and so starved that it seldom flowers well. A bear, garden-border is not so suitable for it as that in which it may be found in a thin wood, or in little openings in a copse, where it enjoys enough light and gets shelter too. Equally, the fresh wood soil would be more welcome to it than the worn out soil in a garden. Also, by planting it in various positions and soils, we may secure an important difference as regards blooming. a cool, woody place, it would bloom 10 days later than in an exposed warm garden border. And this difference could be increased by carefully selecting the position. Apart altogether from the wild garden and its charms, This difference in the time of blooming of the lily of the valley would be a great advantage to all who provide cut flowers, in as much as it would give them late bloom in plenty without trouble. However, giving reasons for the naturalization of the lily of the valley is surely unnecessary. The only surprising thing is that it has not been done to a large extent already because it is so very easy and so very delightful. Recently, a good many different varieties of lily of the valley, nearly as many as 20, have been collected and are beginning to be cultivated by some of our growers of herbaceous plants. The difference in these is not owing to soil or situation. When grown in the same place, they manifest differences in length of spike and size of foliage and also in time of blooming. In some, the spike is short and in others nearly one foot long. This important fact should, of course, be noted by any who would in places where the lily of the valley does not grow wild, entrust themselves in establishing it. There are advantages in wood culture for many hearty plants. The shelter, shade, and soil affording for some things conditions more suitable than our gardens. The warmth of the wood, too, is an advantage. The fallen leaves helping to protect the plants in all ways. In a hot country, plants that love cool places could be grown in a wood where they would perish, if exposed. Placing every plant in one border with the same conditions as to soil and exposure was a great mistake. A great many beautiful plants haunt the woods and we cannot change their nature easily. Even if we should grow them in open places, their bloom will not be so enduring as in the wood. A little woodland planting may indeed be worth doing for the sake of the prolonged or later bloom, even from places and plants that thrive in sunny spots. The Brookside, Waterside, and Bob Gardens. Nearly all landscape gardeners seem to have put a higher value on the lake or fish pond than on the brook as an ornament to the garden, but while we allow that many places are enhanced in beauty and dignity by a broad expanse of water, many pictures might be formed by taking advantage of a brook as it meanders through woody clay or meadow. No such beauty is afforded by a pond or lake, which gives us water in repose, imprisoned water in fact. And although we obtain breath by confining water, still, in many cases, we prefer the brook, or water in motion, as it ripples between mossy rocks or flower-frenched banks. Brooke Margingin II offers opportunities to lovers of hearty flowers which few other situations can rival. Hither II, we have only used in and near such places aquatic or bog plants. And of these usually a very meager selection. But the improvement of the brook side will be most readily affected by planting the banks with hardy flowers, making it a wild garden in fact. A great great number of our finest herbaceous plants, from irises to globe flowers, thrive best in the moist soil found in such positions. Numbers of hearty flowers also that do not in nature prefer such soil would exist in perfect health in it. The wild garden illustrated by the water side will give us some of the most charming garden pictures. plants would have this advantage over water ones that we could fix their position, whereas water plants are apt to spread everywhere, and sometimes one kind exterminates the rest. Therefore it might, in many cases, be better not to encourage the water or water side vegetation, but to form little colonies of hearty flowers along the banks. The plants, of course, should be such as would grow freely among grass and take care of themselves. If different types of vegetation were encouraged on each side of the water, the effect would be all the better. The common way of repeating a favorite plant at intervals would spoil all. Groups of free, hearty things, different in each place as one passed, would be best. An interesting point in favor of the wild garden is the succession of effects which it may afford 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 plowed field, just when the earth is naturally most thickly strewn with flowers. A very little consideration and observation would 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 the early summer. These are not the days for 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 sewn through the autumn, winter, and spring, might certainly begin to look for the fruits and flowers of his labor, 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 to tender to be committed to the earth and an earlier season. The bog garden is a home for the numerous children of the wild that will not thrive on our harsh bear and dry garden borders, but must be cushioned on moss and associated with their own relatives and moist, peat soil. Many beautiful plants, like the wind, gentian, and creeping hairbell, grow on our own box and marshes, much as these are now encroached upon. But even those acquainted with the beauty of the plants of our own box 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 box that some of us come to regard them as exceptional tracks 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, piti-halos. 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 picture plant, golden club, water-airom, 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 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 chair the traveler, he 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 Sagittarius. Southwards and seawards, the bog flowers become tropical in size and brilliancy, as in the splendid kinds of herbaceous hybiscus, while far north and west and south along the mountains, the beautiful and chowy moccasin flower grows the queen of the peat bog. Then in California, all along the searas, 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 widespread marshlands of this globe of ours? From those of the vast, white 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, Were the little bogs' team with nature's most brilliant flowers, joyous in the sun. No one worthy for many mountains, swamp regions are as yet as little known to us as those of the Himalayas, with their giant primroses and many strange and lovely flowers. thing 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 birds eye primrose in the wet mountain side bogs of Westmoreland or the Bavarian Gentian in the spongy soil by Alpine revealants in the snow ooze. Boggs are neither found or desired in or near our gardens nowadays, but wherever they are there are many handsome flowers from other countries that will thrive in them as freely as in their native wastelands.

Ditches and narrow shady lanes, corpses, headdrows, and thickets. People usually seek sunny positions for their gardens so that even even those obliged to be contented with the north side of the hill would scarcely appreciate some of the above-named positions. What? The gloomy and witty dike as a garden? Yes, there are ditches, dry and wet, and every district. They may readily be made more beautiful than many modern flower garden. But what would grow in them? Many of the beautiful wood and shade-loving plants of our own and similar latitudes, things that love not the open sunny hill sides or wide meadows, but take shelter in the stillness of deep woods or in dark valleys, are happy deep within ribbon rocks and galley occupy the little dark caves beneath the great boulders on many a mountain gorge, in which garland with inimitable grace the vast flanks of rock that guard the dark courses of the rivers on their paths through the hills. And as these dark walls ruined by ceaseless pulse of the torrent, are beautiful exceedingly, how much more may we all make the shady dikes and narrow lanes that occur everywhere. For while the nymph gardener of the ravine may depend for her novelties on the stray grains of seeds brought in the moss by the robin when building her nest, or on the mercy of the hurrying wave. We may place side by side the snowy white wood-lilly whose home is in the shades of the American woods, with the twin flower of Scotland and northern Europe, and find both thrive on the same spot in happy companionship. And so in innumerable instances, and not only may be a shirt of numbers of the most beautiful plants of other countries, thriving in deep ditches, and in like positions. But also, that not a few of them, like the white wood lily, will thrive much better in them than in any position in garden borders. This plant went in perfection, as a flower is fair as any white lily, while it is seldom a foothie, but in consequence of being a shade loving and wood plant. It usually parishes in the ordinary garden border or

bad. While in a shady dike or any like position, it will be found to thrive as well as in its native woods, and deep, deep, free, sandy, or vegetable soil, to grow so as not to be surpassed in loveliness by anything seen in our stove's or greenhouses. For wild flowers, take possession of the stiff, formal and shorn hedges that seem the land, often draping them with such inimitable grace that half the conservatories in the country with their collections of small red pots and small mean plants are stiff and poor compared with a few yards length of their blossoming fervor. The wild roses, purple vetch, honeysuckle, and the fervor's bowler clamber above, but not less pretty wildlings, and throw a veil of graceful life over the mutilated shrubs, reminding us of the plant life in the nest-like thickets of dwarf shrubs that one often meets on the high alpine meadows. In these bushes, in a sea of grass, one may gather flowers after they have been all browsed down on the turf. Next to the most interesting aspects of alpine vegetation, there is perhaps nothing in the world of plant life more lovely than the delicate tracerie of low climbing things wedded to the bushes in all northern and temperate regions of the earth. like the grass. they are happy and safe in the Earth's bosom and winter. In spring, they come up as the buds swell. And soon after, finding the bushes once more enjoyable, rush over them as joyously as children from school over a meadow of cow slips. Over bush, over break, on mountain or lowland cops, holding on with delicate but unyielding grasp, they engrave themselves on the mind as the central type of grace. In addition to climbing pea flowers of which the stems perish We have the great tribes of wild finds.

Noble. The stems perish in winter. We have the great tribes of wild finds, noble and foliage and often in fruit. The numerous honey-suckles from coral red to pale yellow, all beautiful, and the comatis rich, varied, and lovely beyond description. From those of which each petal reminds one of the wing of some huge tropical butterfly. To those with small flowers born in showers like drops from a fountain jet

and often sweet as hot-born blossoms. In nature, we frequently see a honey-suckle clambering up through an old, hot-horned tree and then struggling with it as to which should produce the greatest profusion of blossoms, but in gardens, not yet. Some may say that this cannot be done in gardens, but it can be done infinitely better in gardens than it has ever been done in nature because for gardens we can select plants from many countries. Yn yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n y