CLIPPING EVERGREEN AND OTHER TREES. 2^5 



from groups of choice 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 ever- 

 greens we can have them without destroying their forms by the shears. 



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 



Disfigurement of in this way has been chosen for illustration. Of 



forest trees. 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 has one 

 phase which has no relation to any plan, and in so far 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. 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. 

 In countries where Pines often stand alone, as on the foothills of 

 California, I have seen them with 100 feet or more of clean stem. 



We are told that Elvaston is not remarkable for natural beauty, 

 and that the grounds there are so flat that landscape-gardeners, in 

 despair of any other planting, are compelled 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." 



Now level ground has a great deal in it that is favourable to artistic 

 ways of planting. With such ground we may more easily secure 

 breadth, simplicity, and dignity, get dividing lines in the easiest way, 

 richer soil and finer and more stately growth and nobler shelter. 

 Many of the most beautiful gardens of Europe are on level ground, 

 as Laxenberg in Vienna, the English garden in Munich, not to speak 

 of many in our own river valleys and in counties like Lincolnshire. 

 What would be said of planting in all the flat countries of Northern 

 Europe if the assertion were true that we cannot make level ground 

 beautiful by planting in natural ways, to say nothing of the absurdity 



