342 THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



evergreens. The end of all this laborious mutilation is to cause 

 disease and overcrowding, and the best thing is to clear the deformed 

 things away and plant in more natural ways. If we want flower 

 beds, let us have them ; by doing so we can have varied life for more 

 than half the year. If we want beds of choice evergreens we can 

 have them without destroying their forms by the shears. There is a 

 wide choice of beautiful things like Rhododendrons and Azaleas, 

 and if we set these in open ways we can have flowers among them, 

 thus doubling the variety of bloom obtainable from the surface, 

 getting light and shade and the true forms of shrub or flower. 



The Disfigurement of Forest Trees by Clipping. — 

 Recently magazines and illustrated journals, in the great chase 

 after subjects have dealt with the clipped gardens of England, 

 and some of the most ridiculous work ever perpetrated in this way 

 has been chosen for illustration. Of English counties, Derbyshire is 

 the most notorious for examples of disfigured trees. The Dutch, who 

 painted like nature, and built like sane men, left their plantations to 

 the shears, but they always cut to lines or had some kind of plan, 

 judging from their old engraved books. British clipping, however, 

 has one phase which has no relation to any plan, and so far it exceeds 

 in extravagance the methods of the Dutch, Austrian, and French, and 

 that is the clipping single, and often forest, trees into the shape of 

 green bolsters. The late Mr. McNab, of the Edinburgh garden, 

 excellent planter though he was, had an idea that he kept his conifers 

 in shape by clipping. A false idea runs through all growers of trees 

 of the pine tribe, the most frequent victims of the practice, that these 

 trees should be kept in a conical shape, the truth being that all the 

 pine trees in the world in their state of highest beauty lose their lower 

 branches, and show the beauty of their stem and form when growing 

 in their natural way. With a few exceptions, it is the way of these 

 trees to shed their lower branches as other trees shed their leaves. 

 Even in countries where pines often stand alone, as on the foothills 

 of California, I have often seen them with too feet or more of clean 

 stem. 



Articles on this subject are usually of the see-saw sort, the writer 

 praising and blaming alternately, and wabbling about like a blind 

 man in a fair. We are told that Elvaston, in Derbyshire, is not 

 remarkable for natural beauty, and that the grounds there are so flat 

 that landscape gardeners, in despair of any other planting, are com- 

 pelled to have recourse to topiary work ; that " even that man of 

 fame, ' Capability ' Brown, seems to have shrunk from the work of 

 laying out the grounds. Whereupon the earl demanded his reason, 

 and Brown replied, ' Because the place is so flat,' &c." 



Instead of there being any truth in the assertion that we cannot 



