1 68 The American Flower Garden 



should be in a garden. High hopes of the Japanese ilex filling a 

 long-felt want are entertained, but it has not yet been fully tested by 

 time, and it is still expensive. Italian and English gardens owe 

 much of their beauty to an ilex that will not live here, to several 

 species of laurel that we cannot have, and to other evergreen 

 shrubs of which, unhappily, we have no counterparts. It is true 

 that the hemlock and some other of our evergreen trees make 

 beautiful hedges, but the evergreen shrubs that thrive on this side 

 of the sea are lamentably few, and not all of these will endure the 

 pruning shears. For informal evergreen hedges, however, nothing 

 could be finer than rhododendron or laurel. Among bushes that 

 lose their leaves in winter, but compensate us with a prodigal wealth 

 of spring or summer bloom, are the spireas, deutzias, lilacs, altheas, 

 rugosa roses, Japanese quinces, weigelas, and some others, any 

 one of which is effective used for an informal, undipped hedge not 

 required for defence. The barberries, north of Philadelphia, and 

 the hardy thorny orange south of it make good defensive hedges. 

 Mixed hedges rarely, if ever, satisfy the artistic eye. If hedges of 

 any and every sort ever come to be as commonly used here as they 

 are in England, we may make kindling of the fences that now 

 disfigure our land and sing paeons of joy for the deliverance. 

 How did it happen that a people, with all their gardening and 

 other traditions derived from the Old World, could have so far 

 departed from them as to substitute the wooden and wire fences 

 for the green, impenetrable, permanent hedge that requires little 

 mending and no paint ? 



As it is actually cheaper, oftentimes, to plant a bank with 

 shrubbery than to grade and sod it, a concavity on a steep side hill 

 will sometimes be filled in with prostrate privet (Ligustrum Ibota 

 var. Regelianum) or other shrubbery that will bind the soil and 



