CHAPTER IX. 



FLOWERING SHRUBS AND TREES, AND THEIR ARTISTIC USE. 



SPRING comes to us wreathed in Honeysuckle, and summer brings the 

 Wild Rose and the May bloom, and these are but messengers of a host 

 of lovely shrubs and low trees of the hills and plains of northern 

 and temperate regions, and also of the high mountains of countries 

 like India, where there are vast alpine regions with shrubs as hardy 

 as our own, as we see in the case of the white Clematis that covers 

 many an English cottage wall with its fair white bloom. If we 

 think of the pictures formed in thousands of places in England, 

 Scotland, and Ireland, by the May alone, we may get an idea of the 

 precious beauty there is in the American, Asiatic, and European kinds, 

 some of which flower later than our own and make the May bloom 

 season longer. Nothing is lovelier among flowering trees than a group 

 of the various Thorns, beautiful also in fruit, and the foliage of some 

 kinds is finely coloured in autumn. The Thorns are but one branch 

 of, perhaps, the most important order of flowering trees, embracing 



