112 THE WILD GARDEN. 



of those slirubberies every autumn, and, u.s tliey fancy, 

 " prune " and otherwise attend to unfortunate shrul:)s and 

 low trees, leads to this, and especially to the shrubs taking 

 the appearance of inverted besoms. Thus a double wrong is 

 done, and at great waste of labour. Any interesting life that 

 might l^e in the ground is destroyed, and the whole appear- 

 ance of the shrubbery is made hideous from the point of view 

 of art; all good culture of flowering or evergreen shrubs 

 destroyed or made impossible. This system is an orthodox 

 one, that has descended to us from other days, the popular 

 idea being that the right thing to do in autumn is to dig the 

 shrul»l)ery. The total abolition of this system, and the adop- 

 tion of the one to he presently described, would lead to the 

 happiest revolution ever effected in gardening, and be a per- 

 fectly easy, practicable means for the aljolition of the inverted 

 besoms, and the choke-muddle shrubbery, and these awful 

 wastes of black soil and mutilated roots. 



Two ideas should lie fixed in the mind of the improver, 

 the one being to allow all the beautiful shrubs to assume 

 their natural shapes, either singly or in groups, with sufficient 

 space between to allow of their fair development, so that the 

 shrubbery might, in the flowering season, or indeed at all 

 seasons, be the best kind of conservatory — a beautiful winter 

 garden even, with the branches of most of the shrubs touching 

 the ground, no nmtilation whatever visible, and no hard dug 

 line outside the shrubs. This last improvement could easily 

 be effected l)y forming a natural fringe, so to say, by breaking 

 up the usual hard edge from good planting ; by letting, in 

 fact, the edge be formed by well-furnished shrubs projected 

 beyond the hard line, and running in and out as they do on a 



