DECIDUOUS SHRUBS 115 



full sunlight, and very few will succeed at all well in the 

 shade. The difficulty with the California privet is its 

 tendency to shoot up into stiff, top-heavy forms and grow 

 bare and leggy at the base. It fails, moreover, to pre- 

 sent the variety of form of leaf and light and shadow and 

 coloring that give so much pleasure in the hazel, amel- 

 anchiers, and several of the viburnums and dogwoods. 

 There is a privet, also from Japan, called ibota, that has a 

 rounded, attractive leaf, and a much better because more 

 bushy habit, than California, or ovalifolium. For the 

 general purposes of the lawn, the old, well-known common 

 privet, ligustrum vulgare, has decided advantages when 

 compared with the California, because, though less shin- 

 ing in leaf, the foliage is more spreading and thicker at 

 the base of the plant. 



It should hardly need to be said, although it does 

 need saying badly in some quarters, that the practice of 

 clipping the privet into formal hedges, flat or rounded 

 at the top, and into gate-posts and other human or inhu- 

 man devices, is to be deprecated. If all the plants are 

 clipped like those in a formal garden, there will be a unity 

 of effect, whether we conceive the design to be suc- 

 cessful or not ; but to clip a hedge of privet in different 

 forms, and then to cluster against it undipped trees and 

 shrubs, is hardly defensible. 



When we pause before a favorite shrub, like lonicera 

 fragrantissima, the fragrant bush honeysuckle, and 

 attempt to analyze the feelings that predispose us in its 

 favor, we find that there is a mingling of regard for the 

 useful and the ornamental, as displayed by the plant on 

 the lawn, and the better we know and the more we use 

 shrubs, the more we will come to give increasing weight 

 to the useful qualities. 



