CHAPTER VII 

 ARRANGEMENT OF SHRUBBERIES. 



IT is upon the size, number, and arrangement of the trees and shrubs in 

 a garden that its broad effects depend. Diversities in the surface of the 

 land, its eminences and declivities, provide the most effective variations 

 of scenery ; but where these are non-existent, and the lie of the land is 

 flat, the trees then become the most important elements in providing 

 variety of outlook and diversity of background. If the trees and shrubs 

 are not themselves the chief objects of interest in a garden, they must, in 

 all but the smallest areas, form at the least the setting of whatever else 

 the garden may contain. Whatever the picture may be, it is the arboreal 

 vegetation that makes the framing. This being so, it is strange that in so 

 many gardens one should see such striking evidence of no special thought 

 or care for the trees and shrubs they contain. How often one sees, more 

 especially in the case of shrubs, that there has been no endeavour to 

 secure the most suitable and beautiful kinds, or any attempt to draw upon 

 that wealth of material which the enterprise, exploration, and gardening 

 skill of the last fifty years have made available. 



Who is not familiar with that depressing thing known as the " mixed 

 shrubbery" a crowded mass of shrubs, with here and there perhaps a 

 tree, whence all the weaker sorts have disappeared, and in which the 

 stronger ones are left to fight each other for light and space ? The result 

 is that what remains is a survival perhaps of the fittest, but certainly not 

 the most beautiful, and is often merely a jumble of laurels, privets, Pontic 

 rhododendrons, weedy lilacs, coarse spiraeas, and the like. If it were not 

 that such shrubberies may be seen any day of one's life in process of 

 development, we might hope that so many object-lessons would, before 

 now, have brought about their end. 



It is easy to trace their origin and development. A student of 

 human nature would probably say that this sort of " mixed shrubbery " 

 is only one more evidence of the evils of procrastination. At the 

 commencement, the plants are naturally small, and in the hope of 

 producing an immediate effect they are put in rather closely together. 



