FEBRUARY 26 



is left till then, one can only engirdle the whole thing 

 with a soft tarred rope and sling it up somehow or 

 anyhow. But if taken now, when the young growths 

 are just showing at the joints, the last year's mass can 

 be untangled, the dead and the over-much cut out, 

 and the best pieces trained in. In gardening, the 

 interests of the moment are so engrossing that one 

 is often tempted to forget the future ; but it is well 

 to remember that this lovely and tenderly- scented 

 Clematis will be one of the chief beauties of September, 

 and well deserves a little timely care. 



In summer-time one never really knows how beauti- 

 ful are the forms of the deciduous trees. It is only in 

 winter, when they are bare of leaves, that one can fully 

 enjoy their splendid structure and design, their admir- 

 able qualities of duly apportioned strength and grace of 

 poise, and the way the spread of the many-branched 

 head has its equivalent in the wide-reaching ground- 

 grasp of the root. And it is interesting to see how, 

 in the many different kinds of tree, the same laws are 

 always in force, and the same results occur, and yet by 

 the employment of what varied means. For nothing 

 in the growth of trees can be much more unlike than 

 the habit of the oak and that of the weeping willow, 

 though the imlikeness only comes from the different 

 adjustment of the same sources of power and the same 

 weights, just as in the movement of wind-blown leaves 

 some flutter and some undulate, while others turn over 

 and back again. Old apple-trees are specially notice- 



