174 The American Flower Garden 



fruit. And because the broad-leaved evergreens, the majestic 

 rhododendron and the lovely laurel delight one after every other 

 shrub is bare, their popularity steadily increases. People with 

 deep purses buy them by the freight car load to mass along drives, 

 under trees where other shrubs would be unhappy, around ponds 

 and along brooks. Drying out of their fine fibrous roots is as fatal to 

 them as to the azaleas, their cousins. Where water cannot prevent 

 the catastrophe, much leaf-mould mixed with the peaty soil they are 

 planted in helps avert it, but a mulch of leaves or grass cuttings 

 from the lawn over their roots keep them cool and moist in 

 summer when there is most danger of their drying out, and from 

 the alternate freezing and thawing in winter or very early spring 

 from which so many evergreens perish. 



Nature covers her plants with a light mulch every autumn as 

 the leaves fall, and the Japanese learned from her long ago the 

 warmth of many layers of light material, which ward off scorching 

 heat as well as cold. In burning piles of leaves, as many do, we 

 rob our gardens of their warmest blankets and the compost heap 

 of a contribution for which the costly laurel, rhododendron and 

 azalea often pine to death. Our home grounds are apt to be 

 fatally tidy. We don't realise that for the lack of a mulch, in sum- 

 mer as well as in winter, more fibrous-rooted and newly transplanted 

 stock dies than from perhaps any other cause. Indeed, it is almost 

 hopeless to bring to perfection any of the heath tribe without 

 mulching. Among them are the costly and lovely azaleas, with a 

 range of colour from purest white and pink to buff, yellow, salmon, 

 orange and flame all the glory of a sunset being included in their 

 marvellous tints. Many earthly possessions seem paltry indeed 

 when compared with them. A walk along a path bordered by 

 azaleas is like a stroll through a gallery where there is a beautiful 



