164 TREES FOR CITY PARKS, AVENUES, GARDENS, ETC. 



our dark churclies, would be more beautiful than all the 

 evergreens within four miles of Charing Cross, and yet it is 

 only one out of a host of flowering trees belonging to 

 temperate or northern climes, nearly all of them far more 

 presentable objects even when leafless than the debilitated 

 soot-varnished " evergreens^^ which we now select for town 

 planting. Even the Pear and Apple and the Hawthorn 

 families would furnish a grand array of beauty ; but any one 

 who examines the list of our deciduous trees and shrubs, 

 from the tall Acacias to the dwarf early-opening Daphnes, 

 may find a selection which, judiciously arranged, would 

 create a greater attraction in town gardens than has yet 

 been seen. All who know the amount of beauty to be 

 found among deciduous trees will have no difficulty in 

 imagining how attractive our parks could be made by taste- 

 fully grouping and cultivating other flowering trees of equal 

 or nearly equal merit. All those mentioned above thrive 

 well on the London clay, and indeed the same is true of the 

 majority of deciduous shrubs. It would be a great benefit to 

 city gardening if landscape gardeners were to be cooped up 

 in town for a few weeks in the dead of winter, instead of 

 being permitted to run about the pleasant country : they 

 might then consider our wants more than they do. Mean- 

 time, I strongly advise city planters to pay nearly all attention 

 to deciduous vegetation, promising them that their eflforts 

 will not be thrown away, as they too often are at present. 

 They would then find that planting trees is not a " sheer waste 

 of art and money,^'' but one of the most praiseworthy modes 

 of rendering our great unwholesome and ugly human hives 

 healthy, habitable, and cheerful. 



Although so deficient in street trees proper, one of the 

 best and most distinctive features of the suburbs of our 

 English cities is that resulting from the practice of placing 

 little gardens between the house and the road : it is the 

 absence of these which gives such a hard, uninviting, and, 

 to an English eye, hungry look to the unplanjted streets of 

 many towns on the Continent. Although the space is small, 

 a line of trees is usually planted immediately inside the 

 wall; which line sometimes acts as a screen^ but is generally 



