Art Oiit-of-Doors 



Color should be especially regarded in 

 choosing shrubs and creepers. One monot- 

 onous tint of green is to be avoided, but 

 still more, an excessive use of bright-hued 

 plants. Green is Nature's color. In this cli- 

 mate she spontaneously produces few bright- 

 hued plants ; the great majority of those 

 which the nursery-gardener offers us are 

 sports and freaks of Nature which she her- 

 self, perhaps, would regard as lamentable 

 mistakes. Curiosities have, however, a great 

 attraction for the average man, especially at 

 the moment when they rank as novelties 

 also ; and far too many places are disfigured 

 by an accumulation of abnormally colored 

 plants, with striped or blotched or speckled 

 foliage, and especially w^ith fohage of those 

 sickly yellow hues which in nursery-cat- 

 alogues are poetically called ^'golden." A 

 single plant of this sort may often produce a 

 pretty effect, if grouped among others of a 

 normal tint — as a slender golden honeysuckle 

 climbing amid others of ordinary kinds, or a 

 single red Japanese maple associated with a 

 mass of dark green shrubs. But to plant too 

 many of them, and to mingle reds and yel- 



84 



