GOOD TREES AND SHRUBS 197 



every branch hung in May with its full array of pendent 

 bloom of the size and general shape of Snowdrops, only of a 

 warm and almost creamy instead of a cold snow-white colour. 



Few spring-flowering shrubs are more free and graceful 

 than Forsythia suspenses, and if it can be planted on a slight 

 eminence and encouraged to 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. 



ALsculus, or Pavia macrostachya, blooming in July when 

 flowering shrubs are rare, is easily grown and strikingly 

 handsome, and yet how rarely seen. Calycanthus 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 kispida), 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 ever- 

 green 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 i\\e Hibiscus syriacus, or Althsea frutex, the shrubbery 

 representatives of Mallows and Hollyhocks, are beautiful 

 autumn flowers. 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 delight- 

 ful thing in the later autumn. The large-fruited Euonymus 

 (Spindle tree) is another good thing too little grown. 



For a peaty garden there are many delightful plants in the 

 neglected though easy-to-be-had list. One of these is the 

 beautiful and highly fragrant Azalea occidentalis ', all the better 

 that the flowers and leaves come together and that it is later 

 than the Ghent Azaleas. Then there are the two sweet- 

 scented North American Bog Myrtles, Myrica cerifera and 

 Comptonia asplenifolia, the charming little Ledum buxifolium y of 

 neatest bushy form, and the larger L. palustre, whose bruised 

 leaves are of delightful aromatic fragrance ; Vaccinium penn- 

 sylvanicum, pretty in leaf and flower and blazing scarlet in 

 autumn, and Gaultheria Shallon, a most important sub-shrub, 



