THE FLORAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 37 
Another and less grand subject is the weeping lime, Tilia Europea 
pendula, which resembles the common lime in every particular, ex- 
cept that the branches all tend downward ; and if knives and hatchets 
can be kept away from it, the branches sweep the ground all round 
in a most graceful and beautiful manner. 
For a third subject in this series, what can we have better than 
the weeping Wych elm, Ulmus montana pendula, with its fine dark 
colour, and grand half-weeping, boldly-spreading, almost dome-like 
form, yet always free, and the lines escaping here and there with 
delightful nonconformity, as if Nature would say, “This is not a 
tent, or a dome, or a sugar-loaf, or a malt-kin, but a ¢ree—yes, a 
TREE.’ You want a great breadth of grass, and true English plant- 
ing all round about, to bring out the beauty of this magnificent tree 
as it deserves. It is a fit tree for the skirts of a promenade, but it 
is not a promenade tree; no, there is not enough of rigidity in its 
pliability, nor of hardness in its softness, nor of severity in its free 
and wilful grace, to make it quite a promenade tree; but for the eye 
to escape from gravel, stone, burning breadths of colour, and the 
frippery of fashionable talk, by way of such an intermediary as this, 
is as glorious as can well be if promenades are recognized, and we 
dare ever turn from the beauty of human kind, and all that is per- 
suaSive in promenading, to give the eye a wider range amongst the 
persuasions of light and shade, and comminglings of form and con- 
trast and harmony of colour that make up the sum of our delights 
in the admiration of trees. 
The Weeping Ash, Frazxinus excelsior pendula, will not tell 
in masses as weeping beeches and weeping limes do. It must 
stand apart, and assail our powers of criticism or esthetics by 
its own individual merits. And it has merits, though few know 
what those merits are. The stiff and trim way in which the 
weeping ash is usually grown gives no idea of its capabilities, or 
the true nature of its beauty. An old weeping ash that has never 
been pruned or trained, is one of the most wonderful objects 
in the vegetable kingdom. There is such a one in Mr. Beres- 
ford Hope’s park, Bedgebury, which is so bewitchingly beautiful, 
that every artist who sees it jor the first time is inclined to tear up 
all the sketches he ever made of trees, and pass the remainder of his 
days at Bedgebury. This tree has not been trained for an arbour, 
to look like a dome; it has trained itself in its own way, and it 
ines all the grand lines and falling masses common to cataracts. 
me places it tumbles over wildly ; in others it flows forward in 
a rippling sheet of shiny leaves; in others it leaps, and again it 
spreads out softly like a train of skirts of wondrous amplitude, 
which sweep the ground, and actually rustle as if the vegetable 
cataract, made silent for ever, had put on queenly garments, and 
would now brush the dews it was doomed never to augment. Yet 
though this tree, when aged and untrained, is so indescribably beau- 
tiful, the tea-garden pattern to which they are grown in all the 
gardens near London is not to be despised. The shade of such a 
tree is vastly more agreeable than that of a hot summer-house or 
shed, and very often the spread of the branches affords the only 
February. 
