THE RENOVATION OF OLD PLACES. 243 
baskets; provided they stand in places where it is appropriate to 
have flower-vases. 
Old shrubs of any of the standard species, if of large size, even 
though unshapely, may often be turned to good account in the 
places where they stand, by using them as centres for groups of 
smaller shrubs. Sometimes their very irregularity of outline will 
make them picturesque objects to stand conspicuously alone on the 
lawn. Often a shrub of noble size has been hid by inferior shrubs 
and trees crowding it, which may all be removed to bring it into 
full relief. The beauty of full and well grown single specimens of 
our most common shrubs is as little known as though they were 
the most recent introductions from Japan. Not one American in 
a thousand, even among those most observant of sylvan forms, has 
ever seen a perfectly grown bush-honeysuckle, lilac, snow-ball, or 
syringa, though every suburban home in the land is filled with 
them. Growing either in crowded clumps, or under trees, or in 
poor uncultivated sodden soil, we have learned to love them merely 
for their lavish beauty of bloom, and have not yet learned what 
breadth and grace of foliage they develop when allowed to spread 
from the beginning, on an open lawn. 
There are no worse misplantings in most old grounds than old 
rose-bushes, whose annual sprouts play hide-and-seek with the 
rank grass they shelter—roses which the occupants from time im¬ 
memorial have remembered gratefully for their June bloom, till 
their sweetness and beauty have become associated with the 
tangled grass they grow in. There is no reason for having a lawn 
broken by such plants. Rose-bushes do better for occasional trans¬ 
plantings, and their bloom and foliage is always finer in cultivated, 
than in grassy ground. Mass them where they can be cultivated 
and enriched together. Plate XXXI shows many forms for rose- 
beds, and by using care in keeping the strongest growers nearest 
the centre, varieties enough may be displayed in one snug bed to 
spoil a quarter-acre lawn planted in the old way—“ wherewr there 
is a good open space ”—precisely the space that should not be 
broken by anything, least of all by such straggling growers as 
roses. 
Do not be in haste to decide where the shrubs you dig up shall 
