4 TREES AND SHRUBS 



throw down its many-feet-long graceful sprays it 

 then exhibits its best garden use. The Japanese 

 Viburnum plicatum is another shrub well known but 

 unfairly neglected, flowering with the earliest Irises. 

 Grouped with the grand Iris pallida dalmatica it is a 

 thing never to be forgotten. 



AZsculus or Pavia macrostachya, blooming in July 

 when flowering shrubs are rare, is easily grown and 

 strikingly handsome, and yet how rarely seen ! Caly- 

 canthus floridus, with its spice-scented blooms of low- 

 toned crimson, also a late summer flower, is a fine 

 thing in a cool, well-sheltered corner, where the sun 

 cannot burn the flowers. The Rose Acacia (Robinia 

 hispida), trained on a wall or house, is as beautiful as 

 any Wistaria, and the quality of the low-toned rosy 

 bloom of a much rarer colour. It is quite hardy, 

 but so brittle that it needs close and careful wall 

 training or other support. To name a few others in 

 the same kind of category, but rather less hardy, the 

 Sweet Bay is the noblest of evergreen bushes or 

 small trees ; the Tamarisk, with its grey plumes of 

 foliage and autumn flower-plumes of tenderest pink, 

 is a delightful plant in our southern counties, doing 

 especially well near the sea. Clethra alnifolia, against 

 a wall or in the open, is a mass of flower in late 

 summer, and the best of the Hibiscus syriacus, or 

 Althcea frutex, the shrubbery representatives of 

 Mallows and Hollyhocks, are autumn flowers of the 

 best class. A bushy plant of half-woody character 

 that may well be classed among shrubs, and that was 

 beloved of our grandmothers, is Leycesteria formosa, a 



