142 GARDEN-CRAFT, 



beyond the belief of the uninitiated who has seen 

 the bare site before it was planted. 



To speak generally, there should be no need of 

 apology for applying the most subtle art in the dis- 

 posal of trees and shrubs, and in the formation of the 

 ground to receive them. " All Art" as Loudon truly 

 says (speaking upon this very point), "to be acknow- 

 ledged as Art, must be avowed" This is the case in 

 the fine arts there is no attempt to conceal art in 

 music, poetry, painting, or sculpture, none in archi- 

 tecture, and none in geometrical-gardening. 



In modern landscape-gardening, practised as a 

 fine art, many of the more important beauties and 

 effects produced by the artist depend on the use he 

 makes of foreign trees and shrubs ; and, personally, 

 one is ready to forgive Brown much of his vile 

 vandalism in old-fashioned gardens for the use he 

 makes of cedars, pines, planes, gleditschias, robinias, 

 deciduous cypress, and all the foreign hardy trees 

 and shrubs that were then to his hand. 



Loudon every inch a fine gardener, true lineal 

 descendant of Bacon in the art of gardening re- 

 commends in his ''Arboretum" (pp. n, 12) the 

 heading down of large trees of common species, 

 and the grafting upon them foreign species of the 

 same genus, as is done in orchard fruit-trees. 

 Hawthorn hedges, for instance, are common every- 

 where ; why not graft some of the rare and beauti- 

 ful sorts of tree thorns, and intersperse common 

 thorns between them ? There are between twenty 

 and thirty beautiful species and varieties of thorn in 



