This section is from the book "What England Can Teach Us About Gardening", by Wilhelm Miller. Also available from Amazon: What England Can Teach Us About Gardening.
This loyalty to the native wild flowers is an admirable trait in English country gentlemen. In the same spirit country gentlemen in America will some day see to it that their neglected woods are carpeted with wild flowers by the ten thousand as they were in the days of the Indian. One man will plant 1,000 bulbs of Jack-in-the-pulpit* at a cost of thirty-five dollars. Another will make a hit with the swamp pink (Helonias bullata*). And perhaps some one will discover the possibilities of the dainty little star flower (Trientalis Americana*).
In short every wild flower that grows in damp woods should be lovingly studied by someone who has the patience to propagate it and help it establish a good-sized colony, for only when we grow a flower in a large mass, in its right environment, can we discover its true worth and meaning.
We must not hesitate to apply this principle to large, coarse plants that we ordinarily think of as weeds. For example, the viper's bugloss (Echium vulgare) is a draggle-tail weed along dusty roads, but at Iver Heath I saw it glorified almost beyond recognition by the easy magic of bog-planting. A single plant had attained the enormous height of four or five feet and the flowers were about an inch long. You can tell at once that it belongs to the borage family, for the flowers are reddish purple at first, but change to a bright blue and are borne in numerous one-sided spikes. It blossoms all summer, and at the time I saw it was a prodigy of bloom.
 
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