170 The American Flower Garden 



neighbour s thicket. Every town in America needs a well 

 planted public park, if only to serve as an object lesson in beauti 

 fying the home grounds of its citizens. It could be the best of 

 teachers, but how rarely one is! 



For Canada, New England and the Central states, East and 

 West, the main body of shrubs chosen will not be wild cornels, 

 viburnums, spice bush, elder, laurel, azalea, sumac, alder, witch 

 hazel, button bush, clethra, white thorn, or whatever grows 

 naturally round about one s county, for the sufficient reason that 

 there are not enough species in any given locality to fit every place 

 and purpose on the cultivated grounds about one s home. After 

 exhausting their possibilities, reliance must be placed on the trusty, 

 time-tried favourites that need no coddling, such as the lilacs - 

 and is any bush more beautiful than the old-fashioned, fleecy- 

 plumed white lilac ? the heavily scented mock-orange (Philadel- 

 phus) ; the floriferous spireas (except Anthony Waterer s magenta 

 nerve shocker); the lovely deutzias; the Tartarian and other bush 

 honeysuckles; the healthy, fluted-leaved Japanese snowball (not 

 the old-fashioned bush, ever sickly from aphides) and those other 

 members of the viburnum tribe that are doubly decorative in flower 

 and fruit; the Japanese quinces shading from flame to peachblow; 

 the low-spreading Japanese barberry whose exquisite drooping, 

 thorny stems are laden in winter with bright red berries, making 

 it a joy to the eye the year around; the weigelas, the best and worst 

 shrubs we have, for the deep purplish pinks of some of them are as 

 awful as those of the rose of Sharon (Althaea), whose single white, 

 shell-pink, hibiscus-flowered and lavender-blue blossoms are never 

 theless delightful; the forsythia s burst of earliest spring sunshine, 

 the snowberry and the white or pink Japanese roses (R. rugosa), 

 but pray not the magenta ones! 



