1 88 DECIDUOUS TREES 



leaves are vociferously purple for months at a time, and that is 

 why we love them. Trees with abnormally coloured foliage make 

 the most show for the money, and we love to advertise. The 

 English don't. Nature almost never gives us purple or yellow 

 leaves except in autumn. No place can be restful unless green 

 is dominant. Of purple, golden, and silver tones we get plenty for 

 daily purposes in our ordinary trees, but bronze-leaved ashes and 

 purple elms, plums, and catalpas are tiresome to live with. You 

 may be greatly excited at the first sight of a huge blotch of yellow 

 on the landscape, but when you come close you find that it is only 

 an elm, oak, poplar, or box elder gone wrong. And after you have 

 resolved about twenty such cases into mere yellow journalism, the 

 sensation gets a bit sickening. 



The plants just mentioned are what William Robinson calls 

 "tree rubbish." The dignified and lasting members of the group 

 are the purple beech and purple Norway maple. It is right, also, 

 that we should pay big sums for Japanese maples, although they 

 are uncertain about growing. But even these we overdo. 



THE CUT-LEAVED EFFECT 



Only one degree less vulgar than a preponderance of abnormally 

 coloured foliage is a preponderance of cut-leaved trees. Must 

 everything be shredded for us from breakfast food to the trees on 

 our lawn? Why does any one want a mountain ash with leaves 

 like an oak, or a hawthorn with leaves like celery, or an elm with 

 leaves like a nettle, or anything with curled or hooded leaves? 

 The legitimate way to get cut-leaved effects is to use trees that are 

 normally fine-leaved, not the abnormal varieties of maple, alder, 

 beech, oak, elm, and linden. Whenever we want trees for thin, 

 open effects, let us use our own deciduous cypress, Kentucky 

 coffee tree, black locust, or Hercules's club, or else the Japanese 



