h your bed this fall, after
planting and covering each bulb, press a four or five inch flower-pot
lightly into the soil above it. This will act as a partial watershed to
keep the drip of rain or snow water from settling in the crown of the
bulb and decaying the bud. Or if you have plenty of old boards about the
place, they may be put on the bed and slightly raised in the centre,
like a pitched roof, so as to form a more complete watershed, and the
winter covering of leaves, salt, hay, or litter, free of manure, can be
built upon this. Crocuses, snowdrops, and scillas make a charming border
for a lily bed and may be also put between the lilies themselves to lend
colour early in the season.

To cover your bed thoroughly, so that it will keep out cold and damp and
not shut it in, is a _must be_ of successful lily culture. Have you ever
tried to grow our hardiest native lilies like the red-wood, Turk's cap,
and Canada bell-lily in an open border where the porous earth, filled by
ice crystal, was raised by the frost to the consistency of bread sponge?
I did this not many years ago and the poor dears looked pinched and
woebegone and wholly unlike their sturdy sisters of meadow and upland
wood edges. Afterward, in trying to dig some of these lilies from their
native soil, I discovered why they were uncomfortable in the open
borders; the Garden, You, and I would have to work mighty hard to find a
winter blanket for the lily bed to match the turf of wild grasses
sometimes half a century old.

Many other beautiful and possible lilies there are besides these four,
but these are to be taken as first steps in lily lore, as it were; for
to make anything like a general collection of this flower is a matter of
more serious expense and difficulty than to collect roses, owing to the
frailness of the material and the different climatic conditions under
which the rarer species, especially those from India and the sea
islands, originated; but given anything Japanese and a certain
cosmopolitan intelligence seems bred in it that carries a reasonable
hope of success under new conditions.

We have half a dozen species of beautiful native lilies, but like some
of our most exquisite ferns they depend much for their attractiveness
upon the setting their natural haunts offer, and I do not like to see
them caged, as it were, within strict garden boundaries.

The red wood-lily should be met among the great brakes of a sandy wood
edge, where white