Natural Hybrids
Many of the newer wonders of the garden are due, of course, to the art of hybridisation, which may produce (as in the crossing of the sweet william and carnation) almost a new type of flower. To some extent nature, as we are apt to forget, is busy at the same work, though its aims are casual. For example, last week in the eastern fens I was shown, by an eminent botanist, three adjacent marsh orchises, one a dark purple, one almost white and a third just half-way between the two both in colour and certain details of structure. It was a proved case of natural hybridisation. How beautiful are some of these fen flowers pushing out unexpectedly from a waste of sedge or reed. A spearwort seen that day in a Norfolk fen was as big and salient almost as a garden coreopsis. Doubtless sedge is apt to conquer other plants and to repel live things from birds to butterflies ; and some semi-sanctuaries such as Wicken Fen have been much improved and enriched by thoughtful cutting of the sedges. But even by the thickliest covered fens and marshes such plants as the bog-bean or grass of Parnassus flourish ; and the great copper butterfly, if he returned, would find his favourite host plant.
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