72 Landscape Gardening 



planting to furnish a lawn, and shut up the walks here and 

 there in order to produce freshness, but not so many as to 

 encumber and cramp the place. A few good, bold openings 

 between them, where the space is small, will be better than a 

 great number of petty ones. And all such openings should 

 be carried as far as is at all practicable into the surrounding 

 or outside border, that the eye may be required to explore 

 them and not scan them in a moment. 



In the old-fashioned systems of gardening it is usual to 

 place all the dwarf-growing plants at the front of the bed or 

 border, and those of greater height behind them, reserving 

 the taller and more stately forms for the center or the back. 

 A regular slope of branches and foliage is thus occasioned 

 which has the most perfectly artificial appearance that can 

 be imagined. It is of course utterly subversive of all variety 

 and may be likened in form to the sloping roof of a house, 

 wherein only convenience is contemplated. In nature, the 

 very opposite of all this is observable. Bushes and trees, 

 hefbs and bushes, blend together in the freest and most indis- 

 criminate manner, as in fig. i8. And while the edges of 

 natural groups are commonly rounded off with exquisite fin- 

 ish, spiry forms sometimes also jut forth from them and 

 beget a charming diversity. 



And thus should it be with masses of plants produced by 

 art. They should have a roundness of outline, and yet be 

 in the strongest sense irregular, the tallest plants being 

 broiflght near the fronts at some of the most prominent parts, 

 and interspersed through the groups at various intervals, 

 being backed up by those of the next size, and the interspaces 

 filled with smaller and medium-sized plants. Ordinarily, the 

 boldest swells in the groups should have the boldest plants 

 in them, and the smaller projections be furnished with plants 

 a size or two lower, while the retiring and narrow parts may 



