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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



our foreign friends, particularly those of the United States, who 

 have not only sent us of the rich flora of their great country, but 

 have also been our intermediary in securing numerous eastern 

 plants, a noteworthy example of which is before me, the 

 chastely beautiful Magnolia stellata, or Hallcana as it is also 

 called. 



Taking the old with the new, we have at the present day an 

 immense resource of flowering trees and shrubs — a bewildering 

 variety, I might say — so that the difficulty is to know how to 

 employ it properly for the embellishment of our parks and 

 gardens. What to plant and what to avoid is a subject of para- 

 mount importance to a landscape gardener, or to anyone who 

 attempts to lay out and plant gardens so as to create the most 

 tasteful effects under the ever-varying conditions of soil, climate, 

 and situation. How to plant and how to cultivate trees and 

 shrubs should form a prominent branch in the training of every 

 man whose aim is to manage a garden well, be it public or 

 private. The cultivation of trees and shrubs — that is, the 

 proper selection, planting, renovating, pruning, and thinning- 

 is carried out in very few even among the best private gardens 

 in this country, the prevalent idea in the gardener's mind being 

 that, when once planted, no tree or shrub should need further 

 attention. But there is a great difference between cultivated 

 trees and shrubs and those that receive no attention, as an 

 example of which I need only recall the magnificent specimens 

 of Conifers in the garden at Dropmore (which old Philip Frost 

 used to cultivate as carefully as he did his fruit trees) and the 

 miserable, half-starved specimens of the same trees in the neigh- 

 bourhood. Again, let us imagine for the moment a Weigela, 

 Gue'dtr Rose, Mock Orange, or Lilac that has been properly 

 planted in good, deep soil, annually renovated by surface dress- 

 ings, pruned in a rational way, and allowed free space on all 

 sides to develop its long, arching shoots, which every year would 

 be wreathed with bloom. Compare such a specimen with what 

 one generally sees in an ordinary shrubbery where the plants 

 were at the outset planted so thickly that in two or three seasons 

 they form a veritable jungle of choked shrubs, each trying to 

 thrust its head above the crowd, giving no pleasure to anyone 

 who beholds it. The typical shrubbery in an English garden is 

 never cared for, never renovated, never pruned, until the time 



