482 
LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 
beauty and luxuriance which they never do or could 
attain in a green-house or conservatory ; and which 
require in the winter simply the protection of a cool 
green-house, or in most cases of a cold pit sufficiently 
deep and protected to exclude the frost, and with faci- 
lities for occasionally admitting air for ventilation. 
A pit of this description, well drained and dry, and 
twelve or fifteen feet deep, might accommodate plants 
ten or twelve feet high, which, when planted out in the 
pleasure-grounds during the summer, the tub or pots 
being sunk out of sight in the soil, would produce the 
most extraordinary and charming effects. By an intro- 
duction and combination in our own grounds of bananas, 
palms, aloes, the different arundos (a species of bamboo), 
the different dracasnas, the New Zealand flax ( Phor - 
mium tenax ), Bambusa metdke (another variety of 
bamboo), which we hope will prove hardy, the different 
Gannas, and a mingling of the rarer evergreens, like the 
Araucarias (of which Cunninghamii and excelsa are 
very effective), we have, we think, produced a very 
pleasing effect. These, with the Indian cedars, and 
Southern and Mexican long-leaved pines, have quite 
changed a portion of our grounds from an American to 
a tropical and oriental landscape. 
All these plants we have named, and the newer tender 
evergreens which we have not as yet named, would win- 
ter safely (excepting perhaps the araucaria excelsa), in 
a cold pit or cool green-house, or a dry cellar, where 
there was some light and no frost. If we add to these 
the great variety and number of evergreen shrubs — the 
different evergreen Magnolias, the Hollies, the Laurel, 
the Portugal laurel, the half-hardy Rhododendrons, all of 
which are too tender for our climate, we cannot but 
believe the time is not far distant when instead of 
keeping green-houses for the preservation of the ordinary 
green-house plants, persons of taste will build pits for 
the preservation of half-hardy evergreens and ligneous 
