238 Landscape Gardening 



Perhaps the finest revelation of this sort in England is 

 the clumps and masses of our mountain laurel and our 

 azaleas and rhododendrons, which embellish the English 

 pleasure grounds. In some of the great country seats, 

 whole acres of lawn, kept like velvet, are made the ground- 

 work upon which these masses of the richest foliaged and 

 the gayest flowering shrubs are embroidered. Each mass is 

 planted in a round or oval bed of deep, rich sandy mould, 

 in which it attains a luxuriance and perfection of form and 

 foliage almost as new to an American as to a Sandwich 

 Islander. The Germans make avenues of our tulip-trees, 

 and in the South of France, one finds more planted magnolias 

 in the gardens than there are, out of the woods, in all the 

 United States. It is thus, by seeing them away from home 

 where their merits are better appreciated and more highly 

 developed, that one learns for the first time what our gar- 

 dens have lost, by our having none of these ''American 

 plants" in them. 



The subject is one which should be pursued to much 

 greater length than we are able to follow it in the present 

 article. Our woods and swamps are full of the most exqui- 

 site plants, some of which would greatly embellish even 

 the smallest garden. But it is rather to one single feature 

 in the pleasure grounds that we would at this moment direct 

 the attention, and that is the introduction of two broad- 

 leaved evergreen shrubs that are abundant in every part 

 of the middle states, and that are, nevertheless, seldom to 

 be seen in any of our gardens or nurseries from one end of 

 the country to the other. The defect is the more to be 

 deplored, because our ornamental plantations, so far as 

 they are evergreen, consist almost entirely of pines and 

 firs - - all narrow-leaved evergreens - - far inferior in rich- 

 ness of foliage to those we have mentioned. 



The native holly grows from Long Island to Florida, and 

 is quite abundant in the woods of New Jersey, Maryland, 

 and Virginia. It forms a shrub or small tree, varying from 

 four to forty feet in height, clothed with foliage and berries 

 of the same ornamental character as the European holly, 



