66 Hints on Landscape Gardening 



poplars often overhang lower shrubs very prettily 

 and also add to the height of different parts of 

 the group. 



The Lombardy poplars had better be entirely 

 removed from the park, but in the " pleasure- 

 ground " they produce a not unpleasing effect 

 when grouped in large masses. Singly their shape 

 is too stiff and unpicturesque, and used in alleys 

 'they are a real horror. 



On the whole, I try to arrange the larger 

 plantations so that in each section one kind of 

 tree dominates, and, of course, that one of the 

 kind for which the soil is most suitable, but I 

 try to avoid having a whole division with only 

 one kind of tree. This mode of planting is very 

 popular in our German gardens, where the vari- 

 ous kinds of trees, especially evergreens and de- 

 ciduous trees, are as anxiously separated in groups 

 in connected plantations as if contagion were to 

 be feared from one species of tree to another. 

 All this, perhaps, may be said to produce a gran- 

 diose, though hardly a gay, effect, but in my 

 opinion, on the contrary, it gives just the appear- 

 ance of a harlequin's jacket. Nor is such a pro- 

 ceeding in any way founded on Nature. Where 

 Nature, left to herself on an area, relatively as a 

 park, has sown a thousand kinds of trees and 

 shrubs in one climatic temperature, it stands to 

 reason that they must have been much mingled 

 together. Here and there a group may be found 

 making a little wood, as it were, of the same 

 tree, quite naturally, but the systematic separa- 



