i 4 4 The American Flower Garden 



albeit the first which the untrained novice usually essays. Probably 

 the very worst way to use them is to dot isolated specimens about 

 on a lawn the worst way to plant any kind of tree or shrub 

 but mixed masses of unrelated colours, a Joseph's coat effect in 

 foliage, can be awful too. One weeping willow looks well over- 

 hanging a little lake, but not fifty willows there. Trees with 

 pendulous branches have a special grace, but the deformed freaks 

 of the catalogue can spoil any garden picture. Because golden 

 retinisporas are beautiful in themselves is no reason for buying 

 them unless you have a group of evergreens into whose rich colour 

 scale an accented tone is desired, or a dark corner that needs 

 lighting up. No foliage is more exquisitely fine nor more richly 

 coloured than that of the low-growing, shrub-like Japanese 

 maples, yet one never sees them used in American gardens 

 so artistically as in the little gardens of Japan, among rocks 

 and stunted pines and miniature waterfalls, each small tree 

 in perfect harmony of form and colour with its environment. 

 Here we are too apt to lose the fine gradations in their colour 

 scale, the charming individuality of each, when we make masses 

 of maples of many hues in shrubbery borders. A noble speci- 

 men of dark copper beech may be the most beautiful ornament 

 for a lawn, but even there it need not be wholly unrelated to 

 every other colour on the place. Keyed into harmony with dark 

 firs or other deep-toned evergreens, the splendour of its ma- 

 hogany tints is but the more rich. "I have never seen a 

 purple plum tree where it did n't stand out like a sore thumb," 

 confessed a well-known landscape gardener. Nevertheless, he 

 has learned to use it most effectively as a background for 

 flowering peaches, crabs, and blossoming almond and fleecy 

 white spireas, for it looks especially well with white or pink 





