4IO 



Garden and Forest. 



[August 28, 1889. 



to one with yellow blossoms, while a white-flowering plant will 

 harmonize with either. 



Too much stress should not be laid, however, upon the 

 flowering qualities of the shrubs as a whole. Qualities of 

 foliage are more important, because more persistent, and 

 because, after all, green is the color we chiefly want close to 

 the house. A few evergreens are always desirable, but there 

 should not be too many of them. If so, the summer-effect of 

 the plantation will be sacrificed to the winter-effect ; during 

 the summer months it will have too stolid and heavy and 

 gloomy a look. And even in winter this look is given by an 

 over-use of evergreens. Leafless shrubs are beautiful, as well 

 as those in leaf, and almost or quite alone can clothe founda- 

 tion-walls to a degree that suffices when Nature at large is bare. 

 Many deciduous shrubs have a peculiar charm in winter, while 

 they do not fall behind their rivals at other seasons — Golden- 

 twigged Willows, for instance, Red-twigged Dogwoods, and a 

 multitude which carry their bright berries well through the in- 

 clement season. If some of these are selected, and evergreens 

 are sparingly introduced, the effect of the winter shrubbery 

 may be made extremely beautiful. Care should be taken, how- 

 ever, to mass the evergreens a little, so that when they are 

 thrown into full relief by the fall of deciduous leaves they will 

 not look as though spotted about at random ; and a station 

 quite near the walls is, for this reason, usually the best. If 

 deciduous plants, with bright-hued leaves, are, as a general 

 rule, to be avoided, so, too, in an even greater degree, are 

 golden evergreens. It is especially desirable that jyhatever 

 foliage we have in winter should be green ; and a bright-yel- 

 low shrub has an even more distinctly spotty and obtrusive 

 look in winter than in summer. The bright color of the twigs 

 and berries on the deciduous shrubs just named is not open 

 to the same objection, for the hue is then so delicate and airy 

 that it cannot offend the eye. 



The hardest task of all is to plant well around a house which 

 is square in shape and encircled by piazza-s. The absence of 

 angles and recesses makes the grouping of plants very diffi- 

 cult, and it is difficult, too, to vary their upper outline agreea- 

 bly when they cannot rise against a background of solid wall. 

 Many suburban houses are built in this way, and are usually 

 encircled by a line of flower-beds with annual creepers — 

 Nasturtiums for choice — trained against the piazza-lattice and 

 posts. A better device would be to plant hardy creepers 

 against the posts, and very low-growing hardy shrubs else- 

 where, grouping them with higher ones when an angle does 

 offer, and carrying them out to meet higher plantations, if 

 such can be placed a Httle to one side of the house. As very 

 low-growing deciduous shrubs are so inconspicuous in win- 

 ter, a freer use of evergreens may be recommended in cases 

 of this sort. There are many kinds of Japanese Retinosporas, 

 for instance, which grow from a foot to two feet in height, and 

 are admirably adapted for the purpose. Anything hardy and 

 anything green, however, is better than a flower-bed, which is 

 too formal and too gaudy in summer, and which vanishes in 

 winter, leaving that ugliest of all objects, a stretch of naked 

 earth. Much pains and money are often expended, to very 

 poor effect, in planting such beds. For example, we saw last 

 May a large house flanked with piazzas, one side of which was 

 bordered with, first, a thick line of bright Golden Elders, then 

 a wide band of Iris in blossom, and then a broad bed, with a 

 curving outline, filled with showy spring annuals. The first 

 cost must have been considerable, and it was evident that 

 more money and labor would soon be needed to replace the 

 spring-flowers with others, and that when winter came there 

 would be a wide, unattractive line of naked earth. And, mean- 

 while, the spring-eliect itself was hideous in its formality and 

 its gaudy, ill-arranged colors ; and, far from uniting the house 

 with its surroundings, the planting actually separated the two 

 with a bolder, more conspicuous division than had there been 

 nothing but green grass. Unity in color and variety in line 

 were needed, but what was supplied was monotony alone and 

 a crude diversity in color. 



Naturally, however, a few flowers of certain sorts may some- 

 times be introduced with excellent effect on the edge of a 

 shrubbery which encircles a house, or close to the house, 

 between the masses of shrubs. Certain flowers of an archi- 

 tectural character, so to say, like Hollyhocks and Dahlias, Sun- 

 flowers and Gladioli, never look better than when growing 

 against a wall, only there should not be many of them, and 

 their places, as well as their colors, should be carefully chosen. 

 Accents of color will be welcome, but the look of a flower- 

 border should be avoided. 



In selecting shrubs for the purpose now in question, one 

 other consideration should be borne in rnind. This is the 

 natural character of the site. The foundations of a suburban 



villa on a flat piece of ground, which should rightly be treated 

 as a carefully-tended little garden-landscape, and those of a 

 cottage, we will say, on a rocky stretch of New England shore, 

 should not be planted in the same way. In the one case, gar- 

 den-shrubs will be appropriate ; in the other, those native 

 products of our woods and swamps, which are quite as beau- 

 tiful, and almost as numerous. It would be undesirable to 

 surround a villa with picturesque clumps of Mountain Laurel, 

 Blueberry and Clethra, suggestive of really rural scenes ; but 

 such plants as these are just the ones to group about a pic- 

 turesque cottage standing on a rocky site, and with Pines or 

 other native trees in its vicinity. Of course, efforts are some- 

 times made to treat the whole extent of a place like this in the 

 conventional, gardenesque way ; and if the grounds, as a 

 whole, are thus inappropriately managed, it matters little, per- 

 haps, what is done with the house-foundations. But the tide 

 of taste has turned. There is a growing desire to preserve the 

 essential characteristics of a site, and to value them all the 

 more if they are distincfly different from the regulation sub- 

 urban type. And when this desire is felt, there is nothing 

 more important than that, in clothing the foimdations of the 

 house, native local shrubs should be chosen instead of those 

 appropriate to more conventional pleasure-grounds. 



Miles Joseph Berkeley. 



nPHE news of the death of Rev. M. J. Berkeley, the distin- 

 -*■ guished English mycologist, will be received with deep 

 regret, not only by those specially occupied with the branch 

 of botany in which he was pre-eminent, but also by all who are 

 interested in the progress of horticulture and vegetable path- 

 ology, to which he constantly contributed during his long and 

 busy life. He was born April ist, 1803, at Biggin, in the parish 

 of Oundle, Northampton, and, after a preparatory course at 

 Rugby, entered Christ's College, Cambridge, where he gradu- 

 ated in 1825. Although destined for the church, he was much 

 attached to the study of natural history while at the university. 

 At first curate at Margate, in 1833 he assumed charge of two 

 small parishes near Wansford, Northamptonshire, and was 

 also rural dean of Oundle and Weldon. In 1868 he was trans- 

 ferred to the vicarage of Sibbertoft, a small village near Market 

 Marborough, in which quiet and retired parish he passed the 

 remainder of his life. During his later years he was a great 

 sufferer from gout, and for some time had hardly been able 

 to leave his house, or even his chamber. His death occurred 

 on July 30th, at the ripe age of eighty-six years. 



Berkeley's first work in natural history is said to have been 

 on Mollusca, but his reputation rests on his wide knowledge 

 of Fungi, in which he far excelled all his British contemporaries, 

 and was a worthy rival of the distinguished Elias Fries, of-ten 

 called the father of mycology. His botanical work, however, 

 was not confined to Fungi. In 1833 appeared his " Gleanings 

 of British Algae," a supplement to the English Botany, which 

 is still regarded a classic work, and thirty years later he pub- 

 lished a "Hand-book of British Mosses." His writings on 

 Fungi were very numerous ; a few of them in book form, but 

 the greater part papers in botanical journals and the proceed- 

 ings of learned societies. They were devoted especially to the 

 descriptions of species from all parts of the world, for, such 

 was his reputation as a systematist, that collections were sent 

 to him for study from both continents — from the Arctic to 

 Antarctic regions. The new species described by him must 

 number several thousands. Of his books the admirable vol- 

 ume on Fungi in Hooker's British Flora, 1836, seems to us es- 

 pecially excellent. "The Outlines of British Fungology," 

 i860, was an attempt at a revision of the earlier volume with 

 descriptions of the larger species and an enumeration of the 

 smaller species. The "Introduction to Cryptogamic Botany,'' 

 1857, was the first general treatise on the subject in the English 

 language, and contained a large number of original observa- 

 tions, especially with regard to Fungi. 



Berkeley was for many years a frequent contributor to the 

 Gardeners' Chronicle and the journal of the Royal Horticul- 

 tural Society, to whose pages he gave many important original 

 notes on plant diseases, besides many critical reviews of the 

 work of others on this important subject. His contributions 

 to these journals were often in a semi-popular form, and did 

 much to extend the knowledge of a then much-neglected 

 branch of botany. 



The name of Berkeley is held in hardly less reverence by 

 American botanists than by his own countrymen. For a 

 period of nearly forty years after the death of Schweinitz, the 

 first American mycologist, in 1834, scarcely anything was pub- 

 lished on North American Fungi, except what came from the 

 pen of Berkeley, who found a zealous correspondent and 



