The Best Flowering Shrubs— By w. e. Pendleton ;si 



THE CHEAPEST AND MOST PERMANENT WAY TO GET FLOWERS— THE KINDS 

 THAT ARE PLANTED BY THE MILLION, AND WHY THEY DESERVE TO BE 



~\ \ IE want shrubs on every home place 

 * * in America because they furnish more 

 flowers for less money and care and for a 

 longer period of years than any other plants. 

 True, some trees have big flowers and lots 

 of them, but they are higher up in the air, 

 while a bush is just where you can see it and 

 smell it. Shrubs are more permanent than 



144. Deutzias are the most profusely blooming of 

 all shrubs that have small white flowers. Deutrin 

 Pride of Rochester is the best double (five feett : 

 D. Lemoinei, the best single (two feet) 



"perennials" and they are nothing like the 

 bother annuals are. You plant trees for 

 posterity but shrubs for yourself also. You 

 get flowers the second year, if you pay a 

 decent price, and if you go away for a sum- 

 mer, the place does not look like an aban- 

 doned home. The plain truth is that a home 

 without shrubbery is hardly decent. Shrub- 

 bery is just as necessary to a place as cloth- 

 ing to a man. Nine times out of ten the 

 straight line where a building meets the 

 ground should be hidden by shrubs. 



There are only three drawbacks to shrub- 

 bery. The first cost seems big. A good 

 shrub costs half a dollar, while a perennial 

 will cost fifteen cents or a quarter and a 

 packet of seeds a nickel. But think of the 

 hours of backache in tending annuals and 

 of the years of solid comfort in shrubbery 

 that takes care of itself! Again, the shrubs 

 all bloom in spring and summer; only one 

 of importance in the fall. Here again the 

 objection is imaginary, for you have the 

 beauty of autumn colors and of berries. 

 (Moreover, you can plant phlox and Japanese 

 anemone and perennial sunflowers if you 

 want autumn flowers.) In the third place, 

 shrubs are too easy to cultivate. There is 

 nothing to learn about shrub culture, except 

 pruning, and even that is simple, though most 

 people are frightened into thinking it must 

 be a complicated and technical subject, and 

 consequently allow their beautiful bushes 

 to be ruined by ignorant pretenders who 

 treat every bush alike. 



All you have to do in order to cultivate 

 shrubs is to plow the soil or dig it to the 

 depth of a foot or two; give it a square deal 

 in the matter of manure; plant your bushes 

 early enough in spring or fall so that they 

 will feel at home before the summer drought 

 or winter cold; hustle them quickly into the 

 ground so that the roots are not exposed a 

 moment longer than necessary to the sun 

 and air; cut back the top rather severely to 

 balance the loss of roots, and make a good 

 job of planting such as anyone with sense 

 should do. The rule is to plant shrubs two 

 feet apart. If nearer, they look crowded; 

 if farther apart, they look lonely. In two 

 years the bushes will intermingle their 

 branches. In five years, probably, you will 

 want to take out bodily every other bush and 

 move it to some other part of the grounds. 

 You will then have six-foot lilac bushes that 

 would cost you three dollars each at the 

 nursery, and they will flower the very first 

 season after you have moved them. You 

 can always tell how deep to plant a shrub. 

 Set it as deep as it was before or a little 

 deeper. Put your high shrubs back and 

 low ones front. Let the autumn leaves lie 

 where they fall. Give the shrubbery border 

 a dressing of manure in autumn, and if you 

 want more and better flowers than your 

 neighbors, use some commercial fertilizer in 

 the spring. 



The very commonest mistake is to fill one's 

 front yard with all sorts of highly colored 

 abnormal things — variegated elder, purple- 

 leaved plum, weeping willow, double-flowered 

 almonds, smoke tree, cut-leaved maple, red- 

 flowered horse-chestnut and that piercingly 

 magenta outrage on the optic nerve — Spirasa 

 Anthony Waterer. Often you will see all these 

 things in one small yard. It is just as bad 

 to cover one's lawn with such things as to 



sprinkle fourteen kinds of spice all over 

 one's food. Use native kinds chiefly, or spe- 

 cies that fit into our landscape. The "horti- 

 cultural forms" are only for accent. Don't 

 scatter shrubs or plants of any kind over a 

 lawn. Avoid isolated specimens. Group 

 them. Shrubs are for the borders of a place. 

 Don't plant one of each in a long row. You 

 will get a much better effect by having a big 

 solid mass of one or few things in the back- 

 ground, with whatever spice in front you 

 think necessary. Don't plant shrubs in 

 straight lines, because straight lines are not 

 the rule of nature. If you hire a man to 

 plant, and fail to watch him, he will surely 

 set your plants in straight lines. 



The choice of varieties is perplexing be- 

 cause there are hundreds of lovely shrubs, 

 but here is a list that the beginner may tie 

 to. It contains those good old stand-bys that 

 are sold by the million and which are sure 

 to give you your money's worth. First of 

 all, the hydrangea, undoubtedly the showiest 

 of all shrubs and the only one for autumn 

 flowering. Its huge flower clusters are a 

 foot long or more and when cut will last a year 

 without water. The change of color from 

 white to purplish, with brown and other 

 tones, is delightful to watch. Don't plant 

 this in the middle of the lawn, as most folks 

 do. Put it in front of bigger bushes, so 

 that the flowers will have a background. You 

 can train this either into a tree or a bush. 

 If you want the biggest display, plant two 

 feet apart in front of other shrubbery, and 

 cut back rather heavily every year. The 

 showiest variety is Hydrangea paniartata 

 var. grandiflora. The species itself has a 

 smaller and more refined cluster and fits 

 better into our landscape. 



Lilacs are the showiest of spring-flowering 

 shrubs and are easily first in the hearts of the 



145. All flowering shrubs should have a background of trees to show off their flowers. Woods should be 

 fringed by shrubbery, so that the trunKs do not show. Plant irregularly in threes 



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