156 Landscape Gardening 



wood, with their outlying specimen trees or bushes, will 

 greatly enrich the hill and relieve it from any tendency to 

 undue roundness or tameness of outline. An excellent mode 

 for this treatment may often be seen in the deUghtfuUy pic- 

 turesque and ragged patches of common trees with which 

 nature sometimes clothes the faces of hills of a similar charac- 

 ter, such masses nearly always presenting a remarkable fresh- 

 ness, freedom, and beauty of outhne. 



8. Herbaceous Plants- — In respect to the disposal of 

 flowers in gardens, if we include in that term all the simply 

 herbaceous kinds that are not shrubby, or at any rate merely 

 such additional low shrubs as are grown out of doors only in 

 the summer, a considerable reformation in the prevaiUng 

 practice seems demanded. The beds or masses of shrubs on 

 a lawn are often entirely surrounded with a strip of ground 

 appropriated exclusively to the herbaceous tribes. The edges 

 of groups are thus most defectively and tamely finished off; 

 they have an exceedingly blank appearance in winter; the 

 size of the lawn is materially diminished; and such borders 

 can never, without a great deal of trouble, be very neatly 

 kept. To compensate for all this, they impart a little addi- 

 tional gayety during summer, which might, however, be read- 

 ily attained in other ways. 



The desirable plan -would be to dismiss all common herba- 

 ceous plants from the fronts of groups oil the lawn, and to 

 grow such flowers in a separate flower garden. The greater 

 merit of this plan is nowadays widely accepted. 



Not to banish the large class of herbaceous plants and bulbs 

 which could not be thus brought together in beds, and many 

 of which, more especially the spring-flowering species, are 

 extremely interesting, I would grow them in the places usually 

 assigned to them round all the masses of shrubs for the first 

 three or four years after these were planted, and until they 



