THE WILD GARDEN
A PLEA FOR OUR NATIVE PLANTS
ANY persons, I find, are under the impression that we have few, if any, native flowering plants and shrubs that are worthy a place in the home-garden. They have been accustomed to consider them as "wild things," and "weeds," forgetting or overlooking the fact that all plants are wild things and weeds somewhere. So unfamiliar are they with many of our commonest plants that they fail to recognize them when they meet them outside their native haunts. Some years ago I transplanted a Solidago,—better known as a "Golden Rod,"—from a fence-corner of the pasture, and gave it a place in the home-garden. There it grew luxuriantly, and soon became a great plant that sent up scores of stalks each season as high as a man's head, every one of them crowned with a plume of brilliant yellow flowers. The effect was simply magnificent.
One day an old neighbor came along, and stopped to chat with me as I worked among my plants.
"That's a beauty," he said as he leaned across the fence near the Golden Rod. "I don't know's I ever saw anything like it before. I reckon, now, you paid a good deal of money for that plant."
"How much do you think it cost me?" I asked.
"Oh, I don't know," he answered, looking at the plant admiringly, and then at some of foreign origin, near-by. He knew something about the value of these, as he had one of them growing in his garden. He seemed to be making a mental calculation, based on the relative beauty of the plants, and presently he said:
"I ain't much of a judge of such things, but I wouldn't wonder if you paid as much as three—mebby four—an' like's not five dollars for it."
"The plant cost me nothing but the labor of bringing it from the pasture," I answered. "Don't you know what it is? There's any quantity of it back of your barn, I notice."