258 FLOWERS AND BEDDING PLANTS, 
Fig. 5 a. 
The common firs are often planted to form centres for such beds, 
but they soon grow to such over-shadowing size as to be quite un¬ 
suitable. The weeping silver fir, and weeping Norway spruce, 
however, are pendulous to such a degree that they make but slow 
additions to their breadth. If their central stems or leaders are 
kept vertical by tying to a stake or straight twig bound to the stem 
below, and the side branches trimmed back whenever they show a 
tendency to the normal form, the appearance shown in the cut may 
be preserved for many years. Where these varieties of the fir are 
not to be had, the Irish juniper, or the hemlock, may be substituted. 
The former of those trees is almost monumental in its slender 
formality, but is pleasing in color and delicate foliage. The latter, 
if trimmed back every spring in April or May, but not afterwards 
during that season, will exhibit during the rest of the year the most 
airy outline of pendulous spray. The trimming in the spring must 
not be done so as to leave a solidly conical hedge-like form, but 
with some irregularity, imitating within slender limits the freedom 
of outline natural to the hemlock /—the idea being to produce by 
artificial means the appearance of one of nature’s abnormal varieties 
or sports, which will bear the same relation to the common form 
of the hemlock that the pendulous fir in the cut bears to its family. 
The last cut of this chapter, already alluded to, is a form of 
