Beautiful Flowering Shrubs 



[This latter feat he records as an act of bravery for, 

 as he truly remarks, " In England people shudder at 

 the idea of people sleeping with their windows open," 

 and at first he himself looked on the habit " with a 

 sort of dread ! " ] He collected the seeds and sent 

 them back to England. This shrub was justly looked 

 upon by him as one of his greatest " finds," and 

 indeed few plants have been more valuable additions 

 to our gardens than this. It will grow anywhere, 

 even under the shade of trees, and is most hardy. Its 

 shining evergreen foliage is a joy all the year round 

 with its varying tints of green, purple and red. The 

 leaves are cut up into two, three or four pairs of 

 leaflets with a terminal leaflet. Their margins are 

 wavy and set with tender spines. In autumn black 

 berries with a lovely purple bloom stand out as a new 

 beauty among the ruddy-tinging foliage. It is rather 

 a low-growing shrub, usually not more than two or 

 three feet high. 



When one turns to a group of the Darwinian 

 Barberries (B. Darwinii) in the zenith of their glory 

 in late April and early May and notes their rich 

 orange flowers, red-touched, closely clustered along the 

 branches, the massing of the blossoms redeeming their 

 small size from insignificance, and the vivid hue 

 enhanced by the black-green foliage, one sees a spec- 

 tacle of shrub display that cannot easily be forgotten. 



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