Art Out-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 with foliage 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- 
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