CHAPTER VIII. 



FLOWERING SHRUBS AND TREES, AND THEIR ARTISTIC USE. 



SPRING comes to us wreathed in Honeysuckle, and summer brings 

 the Wild Rose and the May bloom, and these are but messengers 

 of a host of lovely shrubs and low trees of the hills and plains of 

 northern and temperate regions, and also of the high mountains 

 of countries like India, where there are vast alpine regions with 

 shrubs as hardy as our own, as we see in the case of the white 

 Clematis that covers many an English cottage wall with its fair 

 white bloom. If we think of the pictures formed in thousands of 

 places in England, Scotland, and Ireland by the May alone, we 

 may get an idea of the precious beauty there is in the American, 

 Asiatic, and European kinds, some of which flower later than our 

 own and make the May bloom season longer. Nothing is lovelier 

 among flowering trees than a group of the various Thorns, beautiful 

 also in fruit, and the foliage of some kinds is finely coloured in 

 autumn. The Thorns are but one branch of, perhaps, the most 



59 



