359 
PARK AND CCnCTCRY. 
garden. The big Snow-ball stands in my mother’s 
garden in the village of Brighton, 111., thirty-five 
VIRBURNUM OPULUS. (High, Or Bush Cranberry.) 
miles north of St. Louis. It is an old plant; really 
a small tree some fifteen feet high, and is this spring 
a notable example of the necessity for carefully 
pruning flowering shrubs each year. For while the 
old wood was well covered with flowers, they were 
small; but all of the fresh, smooth, white wood not 
more than two or three years old, bore immense 
flowers, uniform in shape and size, and I found none 
less than six inches in diameter and deep in pro- 
portion. With proper pruning the plant might 
every year be composed of young wood. The tree 
was a beauty as it stood, as is shown to some ex- 
tent, by the cut, but fancy it covered with such 
flowers as the large ones born this year in abund- 
ance on the newer canes. 
But while cultivated flowering shrubs and trees 
are interesting, beautiful and indispensable, there 
is an indescribable charm about those of the wild- 
wood, and never have their blossoms been more 
abundant, more lovely or more fleeting than this year. 
Hundreds of Red Bud trees have tinged the cheeks 
of the woods with soft blushes. In many cases 
their drooping racemes fringed every branch so 
thickly as to show only a skeleton tree through the 
pink veil, the entire absence of foliage accentua- 
ting this effect. Blum blossoms whitened the thick- 
ets and sweetened the air, and clouds of delicious 
flowers clothed picturesque, scattering groups of 
wild Crab Apple trees. The nice effect of these 
natural colonies of wild crabs of various sizes, from 
tiny ones three feet high to old trees fifteen and 
twenty in height, and standing openly at irregular 
distances is a lesson in planting worth noting. Oc- 
casionally one stands alone at the border or on the 
outskirts of a wood. One ot these perhaps twenty- 
five feet in height, (the largest wild crab tree I re- 
call seeing anywhere), was set from top to bottom 
with clusters of buds, mostly just ready to open, 
and not a flower in sight. The small, glowing 
carmine buds were like well set gems. 
Wild cherries, always standing singly and 
usually isolated, bore masses of graceful racemes 
of small white flowers, and over on the river the 
common white Dogwood stood out distinctly against 
the cool, dusky depths of the ravines and clefts of 
the Mississippi bluffs. 
Two beautiful Thorn trees are quite plentiful 
hereabouts; Crataegus Nigra, commonly known as 
Black Haw, and what is called here Red Haw, 
which is, I believe, common Hawthorn, C. oxya- 
cantha. 
The black thorns I have only found in moist 
bottom lands near living streams. It makes a 
handsome tree and one or two standing near the 
water were large — thirty-five or more feet high. Its 
deeply lobed leaves resemble those of the Mulberry, 
and its flowers are like pear blossoms in size, color, 
odor and the form of their clusters, but are placed 
much more effectively on the tree in that they face 
outward in all directions. 
The Hawthorn or Red Haw is a little beauty. 
The best specimen found — and it was a picture — 
stood alone in a pasture, on quite a steep hillside 
facing northeast. A very dry and exposed situa- 
tion. But the hills and trees at a distance of from 
thirty to fifty feet sheltered it on the west and 
SNOWBALL. 
