SHRUBBERY. 



268 



SHRUBBERY. 



a few Pines and Firs ; laurels, and 

 with a few roses, and perhaps a few 

 honeysuckles. The rest is made up 

 of the common mixture planted hy 

 contractors or jobbing gardeners on 

 such occasions. The object is merely 

 to produce a plantation which shall I 

 have some flowering shrubs in it, and 

 some herbaceous plants and roses. 

 If we examine the progress of such a 

 plantation from the time it has been 

 planted till it has attained the age of 

 twenty or thirty years, we shall find 

 that at the end of four or five years 

 the herbaceous plants will become 

 choked up, and are either killed or 

 rendered unsightly. In six years the 

 roses will have ceased to flower freely 

 for want of light and air, and of 

 manuring the soil ; and hence they 

 will have become the very reverse of 

 ornamental. In ten years the finer 

 shrubs will have been choked up by 

 the coarser kinds, and in twenty 

 years almost all the shrubs will have 

 vanished, having been destroyed by 

 the trees. There is no way of pre- 

 venting this result to a shrubbery 

 planted in the usual manner, except 

 by constant thinning; beginning in 

 the third year, and removing all the 

 herbaceous plants that have not suffi- 

 cient room and air and light to grow 

 and flower freely. The bulbs may 

 be left as long as they will grow ; 

 because as they have but little foliage, 

 and that foliage is produced early and 

 soon dies off, they are under no cir- 

 cumstances so disagreeable in their 

 appearance as dicotyledonous plants. 

 The roses should be removed when- 

 ever they cease to flower vigorously ; 

 and all the other shrubs should be 

 thinned out when their branches 

 begin to interfere with one another. 

 Where the shrubbery is twenty or 

 thirty feet wide, every shrub should 

 be kept separate from every other 

 shrub, so as to be clothed with 

 branches from the ground upwards ; 



or the shrubs should be encouraged 

 to grow in groups of different sizes, 

 each group being kept more or less 

 distinct from every other group. It 

 may be thought that this mode of 

 keeping the single plants and the 

 groups distinct, will prevent the 

 shrubbery from serving as a screen ; 

 but this is a mistake ; because though 

 the plants, by being placed alternately, 

 will admit the eye of the spectator on 

 the walk to see in among them, which 

 in passing along a walk adds greatly 

 to the variety of its effect, yet this 

 very circumstance, will prevent the 

 ' eye from passing the boundary. Any 

 ! person may prove this by drawing 

 ! circles representing the shrubs or 

 groups on paper to a scale ; and sup- 

 posing the strip of plantation to be 

 thirty feet in width ; and the circles 

 some of them to be five feet in 

 diameter, and some of them ten feet. 

 The style of planting and thinning so 

 as to keep each plant distinct, and 

 always about to touch but never 

 actually touching those around it, is 

 what Mr. Loudon calls the garden- 

 esque treatment of shrubberies and 

 plantations ; and the style of group- 

 ing is called the picturesque mode of 

 planting and management. These 

 remarks may be considered as direc- 

 tions for making the most of a shrub- 

 bery already planted in the common 

 manner ; and in so far as thinning is 

 concerned, they will equally apply to 

 the mode of planting which is now 

 about to be described. 



Planting shrubberies so as to pro- 

 duce variety in the aspect of the 

 plantation is to be effected by one 

 mode only, and that is to cause oue 

 kind of tree or shrub always to pre- 

 vail in one place. In extensive 

 shrubberies this will require several 

 plants of the same species or variety 

 to be placed together ; but this occa- 

 sions no additional expense ; because 

 in a common shrubbery at least, the 



