Celandine.
Columbine.
Adder’s Tongue.
Speedwell.
Thorn Apple.
Virgin Bower.
Whin.
These alone of hundreds give a lift to the day: there’s a story to each of them.
Take our England as a garden and let the eye roam over the land. Here’s the flat country of the Fens, long, long vistas of fields, with spires and towers sticking up against the sky. Plenty of rare flowers there for your gardener, marsh flowers, water plants galore. That’s the place to see the sky, to watch a summer storm across the plain, to see the Poplars bending in an angry wind, and the white windmills glare against purple rain clouds. Few hedges here but plenty of banks and dykes, and canals they call drains. Here you may find Marsh Valerian, Water Crowsfoot, Frogbit, pink Cuckoo-flowers, Bog Bean, Sundews, Sea Lavender, and Bladder-worts. The Sundews alone will give you an hour’s pleasure with their glistening red glands tricked out to catch unwary flies and midges.
Then there’s a wild garden waiting you by stone walls in the dales of Derbyshire, or in the Yorkshire wolds, or the Lancashire fells. On the open heaths, where the grey roads wind through warm carpets of ling and heather, you can fill your nostrils with the sweet scent of Gorse and Thyme.