2) INTRODUCTION. 
uses of trees and shrubs, it may be sufficient to observe, that 
there is hardly an art or a manufacture, in which timber, or 
some other ligneous product, isnot, in one way or other, em- 
ployed to produce it. 
The use of trees in artificial plantations, in giving shelter or 
shade to lands exposed to high winds or to a burning sun, and 
in improving the climate and general appearance of whole tracts 
of country; in forming avenues to public or private roads, and 
in ornamenting our parks and pleasure-grounds, is too well 
known to require to be enlarged on here. 
Every one feels that trees are among the grandest and most 
ornamental objects of natural scenery: what would landscapes 
be without them? Where would be the charm of hills, plains, 
valleys, rocks, rivers, cascades, lakes, or islands, without the 
hanging wood, the widely extended forest, the open grove, the 
scattered groups, the varied clothing, the shade and intricacy, 
the contrast, and the variety of form and colour, conferred by 
trees and shrubs? A tree is a grand object in itself; its bold 
perpendicular elevation, and its commanding attitude, render it 
sublime ; and this expression is greatly heightened by our know- 
ledge of its age, stability, and duration. The characteristic 
beauties of the general forms of trees are as various as their 
species ; and equally so are the beauty and variety of the rami- 
fications of their branches, spray, buds, leaves, flowers, and 
fruit. ‘The changes in the colour of the foliage of trees, at 
different seasons of the year, alone form a source of ever-varying 
beauty, and of perpetual enjoyment to the lovers of nature. 
What can be more interesting than to watch the developement 
of the buds of trees in spring, or the daily changes which take 
place in the colour of their foliage in autumn ? — But to point 
out here all the various and characteristic beauties of trees, would 
be to anticipate what we shall have to say hereafter of the 
different species and varieties enumerated in our Work. 
Shrubs, to many of the beauties of trees, frequently add those: 
of herbaceous plants; and produce flowers, unequalled both for 
beauty and fragrance. What flower, for example, is compa- 
rable in beauty of form and colour, in fragrance, and in inte- 
resting associations, with the rose? ‘The flower of the honey- 
suckle has been admired from the most remote antiquity, and» 
forms as frequent an ornament of classic, as the rose does of. 
Gothic, architecture. In British gardens, what could compensate 
us, in winter, for the arbutus and the laurustinus, or even the 
common laurel and the common ivy, as ornamental evergreens ;' 
for the flowers of the rhododendron, azalea, kalmia, and 
mezereon, in spring; or for the fruit of the gooseberry, currant, 
and raspberry, in summer? And what hedge plant, either in 
Europe or America, equals the common hawthorn? In short, 
