CHAPTER X 



CLIMBING PLANTS AND CREEPERS 



NO words need be wasted in an endeavour to emphasise the 

 important part played by climbing plants and creepers in 

 the building up and development of the garden beautiful. 

 Their variety is infinite, they may be employed in a hundred ways, 

 and with equally satisfactory results hi the ornamentation not 

 less of the walls of the country cottage and its boundary fences 

 than of the walls and terraces of the stately mansion. Their aid 

 may be called in, with the confident assurance that they will not 

 fail to achieve their purpose, in the decoration of the verandah, 

 the doorway, the French window, the wooden fence of the sub- 

 urban villa, the humble arch before the artisan's doorway, and 

 the elaborate pergola that now finds a place in nearly every 

 garden with any pretensions to spaciousness. Garden taste and 

 it is gratifying to find that it is so tends more and more to reliance 

 on natural effects and less on architectural design. It seeks to 

 allow Nature to exercise her beneficent sway, so that she be not 

 confined too rigidly within geometrically designed limits. And in 

 contributing to this end, in softening the outlines of bare walls 

 and fences, there is nothing that can be placed in competition with, 

 or take the place of, the climbing plants and creepers that bring 

 transforming clouds of beauty hi their train. 



Nor need the economical gardener hesitate to cultivate them 

 in plenty on the score of expense. Many of those which grow 

 most quickly, and on that account are all the more valuable in 

 hiding ugly expanses of bricks and mortar and bare wooden 

 fencing, are annuals, the seed of which can be purchased for a 

 few pence. Tropaeolum majus (the climbing nasturtium) and 

 tropseolum canariense (the canary creeper) are familiar plants 



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