Shrubs 167 



grouped around them take off the sharpness from corners, and let 

 sunshine stream in at the windows. Banked in front of foundation 

 walls, they relieve the hardness of the line where house and land 

 meet. The home seems to nestle cosily in a nest of green instead 

 of springing suddenly from the lawn like a Jack from a box. For 

 filling in the angles of a house and the corners between its steps 

 and side walls, for extending architectural lines that end 

 too abruptly, for helping to conceal faulty design, for softening 

 hard, uncompromising masonry such as high retaining walls 

 and buttresses, for making entrances inviting and taking the 

 curse off wire fences and red brick enclosing walls, what should 

 we do without shrubs ? 



Technically, the difference between a tree and a shrub is a 

 matter of one stem or many stems from the root, but some species 

 there are that do very much as they please, to the confusion of 

 classifiers. The shad bush, the dogwood, the starry magnolia and 

 the laburnum, for example, may be either bushes or trees. Much 

 top-shearing of the boxwood may cause several stems to spring from 

 the root around its central trunk, thus changing it by the mere act 

 of pruning from a tree to a shrub. Because some shrubs that are 

 top-pruned make dense growth at the bottom, they are especially 

 desirable for hedges. Such is the over-planted but indispensable 

 privet which, if left to its own devices, becomes tall and leggy. 

 Sheared of its new growth, on which ill-scented blossoms would 

 form in a natural state, it devotes all its splendid energies to making 

 stems and foliage near the ground until a green wall, apparently 

 solid, is formed by a hedge of it. 



For most purposes there is a bewildering array of shrubs to 

 choose from, but what should we do for formal hedges without the 

 ubiquitous privet and box ? Yet the last place to find monotony 



