112 THE WILD GARDEN. 
of those shrubberies every autumn, and, as they fancy, 
“prune” and otherwise attend to unfortunate shrubs and 
low trees, leads to this, and especially to the shrubs taking 
the appearance of inverted besoms. Thus a double wrong is 
done, and at great waste of labour. Any interesting life that 
might be in the ground is destroyed, and the whole appear- 
ance of the shrubbery is made hideous from the point of view 
of art; all good culture of flowering or evergreen shrubs 
destroyed or made impossible. This system is an orthodox 
one, that has descended to us from other days, the popular 
idea being that the right thing to do in autumn is to dig the 
shrubbery. The total abolition of this system, and the adop- 
tion of the one to be presently described, would lead to the 
happiest revolution ever effected in gardening, and be a per- 
fectly easy, practicable means for the abolition of the inverted 
besoms, and the choke-muddle shrubbery, and these awful 
wastes of black soil and mutilated roots. 
Two ideas should be fixed in the mind of the improver, 
the one being to allow all the beautiful shrubs to assume 
their natural shapes, either singly or in groups, with sufficient 
space between to allow of their fair development, so that the 
shrubbery might, in the flowering season, or indeed at all 
seasons, be the best kind of conservatory—a beautiful winter 
garden even, with the branches of most of the shrubs touching 
the ground, no mutilation whatever visible, and no hard dug 
line outside the shrubs. This last improvement could easily 
be effected by forming a natural fringe, so to say, by breaking 
up the usual hard edge from good planting; by letting, in 
fact, the edge be formed by well-furnished shrubs projected 
beyond the hard line, and running-in and out as they do on a 
