American Plants for American Gardens

XI. THE BOG

CHAPTER XI THE BOG A TYPICAL bog is a perfect circle with the plants arranged according to a definite plan into a series of concentric zones. In the very middlethere is often a pool of water which is surrounded by a broad band of sphagnum. This moss is springy and spongy and so treacherously unstable that it is dangerous even to try to step upon it. It is difficult to tell how deep it is. Sometimes it is a thin layer, barely a foot thick, that seems to float on the top of the water. Then again it is a soft mat of unmeasurable thickness. This sphagnum is moisture-laden. It is bronze-toned and spread with the bronze-toned streamers of trailing cranberries. It forms a groundwork for the other plants. Here the buckbeans spread their dark shining leaves. They have tiny star-like velvetywhite blossoms in the spring. Here the golden clubs of the Orontium aquaticum grow out of bunches of turquoise blue leaves and look like golden markers. The cotton grass is everywhereand hasflowerswhose cream-toned silken puffs are so airily attached to long slender stalks that they look as if they had just alighted there. And strange as it may seem, there are tiny seedling-like red maples scattered all over. Then there are diminutive sundews, the famous [98] The Bog little fly-catchers, decorative little plants that have circlets of tiny leaves with bristly glands that glisten. They are often found around Sarracenia purpurea, the pitcher plant. This has clusters of pitcher-like, water-filled leaves, from which thin erect flower stalks rise a foot or two and are terminated by solitary globose closed flowers so large and heavy that they droop. The whole plant is like a sculptured ornament and is overlaid with bronze and purple coloring. Besides there are the tiny rare-looking rose pogonias with an elusive perfume, exquisite coloring, and very dainty modeling. Thisflower-strewnsphagnumgarden is surrounded by a ring of low shrubs. Sheep laurels, pale laurels and clammy azaleas, leather leaf and bog rosemaries, all about the same height, intermingle and form a nicely ordered compact border. All these shrubs have lovely blossoms. The sheep laurels have rose-toned flowers and the pale laurels crimson flowers that are placed on laterally arranged pedicels scattered loosely among the leaves. The azaleas have clusters of large white flowers with tubular glandular-covered corollas. The leather leaf has glossy white flowers that hang in single file along the undersides of the stems, and the bog rosemaries have flowers that droop in little clusters from the axils of the leaves. The refinement of these plants is just as noticeable when they are without blossoms, for they all have small leaves of astonishing beauty. The leaves of the sheep laurels are evergreen of a soft tone, while the [99] American Plants for American Gardens pale laurels have even lighter foliage with undersides that are gray-white with a bloom. The foliage of the clammy azaleas is rough and hairy. The dulltoned leather leaf leaves are relieved by a sprinkle of finescurf. The bog rosemary has the daintiest leaves of all. Their slenderness, their very stiffness and their spacing far apart on the stems gives them the utmost distinction. Moreover their curled-up edges make them seem even narrower than they are, while the pubescent undersides are so pale gray that they give a gray-green tone to the whole plant. This gray-green is repeated by the larches that grow singly here and there at the very edge of the border. They are slender trees. The light showing through the loose framework gives an atmospheric mistiness to their light green needle clusters, spaced far apart upon black twigs. The whole effect of the trees is noticeably airy. It is the larches that attract attention to the bog from far away. The only way to reach them and the bog itself is by going across the meadow, passing gray birch copses and thickets of arrow-woods and high blueberries. In their midst hummocks overgrown with osmunda ferns and black alders rise out of little pools of dark water. It is a dangerous journey . Only the most adventurous descend into the hollow and get a close view of the trees and the bog itself. And only they know what an enchanted place full of rare shrubs and flowers lies hidden there within the thicket-surrounded...