Shrubs 171 



However reliable all these may be as general purpose shrubs, 

 others will be wanted for special purposes. First of these in public 

 estimation is the large white-flowered hydrangea (H. grandiflora, 

 var. paniculata)) planted by every one who owns a twenty-foot lot. 

 Severely pruned, well enriched, and copiously watered at flowering 

 time, it furnishes great drooping heads of snowy bloom in late 

 summer, when it has the shrubbery stage to itself. How may 

 so conspicuous a shrub be artistically used in a landscape garden ? 

 Certainly the way not to plant it or any other startling bush is to dot 

 it around a lawn the usual practice. A good rule to follow is 

 to plant nothing anywhere that is not connected with the con 

 struction lines of a place. A lot of unrelated details, however 

 beautiful in themselves, are always bad art out of doors. The 

 great hydrangea, massed with a not far distant background of 

 evergreens or other low-branched trees, or where its drooping 

 panicles may hang in the foreground of heavy shrubbery, gains 

 rather than loses by its position. A purple, golden or variegated- 

 leaved shrub, if isolated on a fair green lawn, detached from all 

 connection with the composition lines of planting, is all the more 

 a distracting sight because so common. Such special purpose 

 shrubs fulfill a distinct destiny in enlivening masses of shrubbery 

 which, without them, might easily be monotonous. They add 

 emphasis, richness and variety of tone. Colour may be the chief 

 charm or the greatest offence to the eye, so wherever applied it 

 must be used as sparingly and artistically as in a living-room. In 

 the garden, especially, it is apt to be overdone. The dwarf horse 

 chestnut, that sends up great spires of fleecy white flowers above 

 masses of healthy foliage in July, after the pyrotechnic display from 

 the spring shrubs has ended and before the hydrangea, the blue 

 spirea and the altheas begin to bloom, serves the special purpose of 



