316 
THE GARDENING WORLD 
January 17, 1891. 
shops out of the New Market in Aberdeen ; hut there 
were now upwards of thirty or thirty-five throughout 
the city, all of which were making a little money, or 
at least a comfortable living. He concluded by hoping 
that the gathering would be the forerunner of many 
similar events. 
A musical programme was then gone through, those 
contributing being Misses Gordon and Hendry, and 
Messrs. Robertson, Hendry, Sim, Fairweather, and 
Brown. A dance took place after the concert. A 
meed of praise is due to Mr. Alex. Burns, Jun., 
New Market, the courteous and obliging secretary, for 
unremitting and unvarying kindness to all, and for his 
inception and carrying out of one of the most successful 
assemblies ever held in Aberdeen. 
-►s^h.- 
LATE-FLOWERING CHRYSAN¬ 
THEMUMS. 
I have to-day cut a nice basketful of flowers for room 
decoration of the following varieties, Comte de Germiny, 
Rosea Superba, Madame C. Audiguier, and Monsieur 
Astorg. I therefore consider these deserve to be called 
late-flowering sorts ; they are all Japanese and rather 
tall growers. A clerical gentlemen looking at our 
plants last August inquired if we grafted any, and 
replying in the negative, he said a friend of his living 
near Oxford grew a good number of plants, and grafted 
several varieties on to one plant. One of my assistants 
who heard the conversation took the hint, and a few 
days afterwards selected one of the weakliest plants 
—Mrs. Forsyth. He cut the growths to about 1 ft. 
high, then took five “ tip-ends ” of plants growing in 
the open border, and inserted them in the same way as 
he had seen Coleus sometimes worked, when several 
kinds are put on to one plant. They were bound with 
roffea, and a little moss was tied around them and 
kept moist. The plant so treated was put in a small 
greenhouse, and shaded from the sun. The scions 
flagged, but eventually united and made growths about 
1 ft. long, and all bloomed. 
The plant came in for a fair share of notice from 
those who came to see our show house when the Chry¬ 
santhemums w r ere in bloom. The union between the 
stock and scion in each case was even and complete, 
and the plant having a clear stem of 1 in. or 2 ins. 
out of the soil, many wondered what was the matter 
with it, seeing that it bore incurved, reflexed and 
Japanese flowers of different colours. It was a novelty 
and nothing more. I think it not improbable that the 
same hand will carry on this experiment another 
season, hut will select varieties of a different habit of 
growth and height as well as variety. It merely shows 
what can be done with the Chrysanthemum; and 
where only one plant of aDy new kind i3 being grown, 
its superfluous growths can he taken off and woiked 
on to another plant. 
I have been wondering how these tall growers, such 
as Comte de Germiny and Rosea Superba, would act if 
they were grafted on to some other kind. They 
certainly would not run up such a height, and con¬ 
sequently would be more useful for staging in the 
greenhouse. We have had Chrysanthemums in bloom 
for over six months, and still we want them longer. 
There are growing in the open borders a yellow and a 
white variety that have not been disturbed for the past 
three years ; the yellow one opened its first bloom 
about the first of July last, and there were blooms 
outside in plenty, until the frost and snow of November 
2oth spoilt all. I am unable to give this early one its 
name. The next to follow in the open border are the 
White and Golden Madame Desgranges, which should 
be in every garden. — T. TV., Yelverton, Norwich, 
January 6th. 
-•>**•- 
SPRING-FLOWERING TREES 
AND SHRUBS.* 
By Mr. W. Goldring, F.R.H.S. 
The subject upon which I have been asked to speak to¬ 
day is of considerable importance in gardenin'-, seeing 
that hardy tree and shrub growth forms the foundation 
of all really beautiful gardens and parks. We can 
hardly imagine what England would be like without 
the multitude of hardy ornamental trees and shrubs 
which we have brought from other lands to embellish 
our garden and park landscapes, and to mask the 
poverty of our native tree flora. Happily our insular 
climate is peculiarly suitable for the growth of the vast 
assemblage of exotic arborescent vegetation, which we 
have gathered from every temperate region of the world ; 
indeed, there is probably no other country wherein one 
garden may be grown in the open air the plants from 
•' From The Journal of the Boyd,l Horticultural Society. 
such widely separated countries as Canada and Chili, 
Japan and New Zealand. 
An English open-air garden, a few acres in extent, 
may at the present day contain a greater variety of 
temperate vegetation than can possibly be seen 
collected in a similar area in any other country, and 
this is why our park and garden scenery is the 
admiration, not to say the envy, of all foreign visitors, 
especially those from the mid-continent, where the 
rigorous winters and hot and dry summers are inimical 
to the well-being of hosts of the beautiful trees and 
shrubs which we enjoy here, where the atmosphere is 
perpetually moist, and the winters rarely injure even 
the plants of Japan and New Zealand. 
One would scarcely imagine that the subject upon 
which I am speaking is so important, considering the 
little attention that is given to it at the present time. 
It is, in fact, one of the departments of gardening left 
to look after itself, and, moreover, is one of the branches 
of the art in which few young gardeners are trained. 
No special society is devoted to ornamental arboriculture 
as in the case of other important classes of garden 
plants, and rarely do we see at exhibitions, except those 
held by this society, any attempt to bring before the 
public the most beautiful of the older kinds of hardy¬ 
flowering trees and shrubs, and the many new varieties 
that are being continually introduced. That a really 
beautiful and interesting display can be made of 
flowering trees and shrubs alone is shown by the large 
and magnificent collection gathered here to-day, chiefly 
from our great national botanical garden at Kew, where, 
happily, there exists the richest collection of temperate 
trees and shrubs in the world, notwithstanding the fact 
that the soil there is not naturally well adapted for 
the luxuriant growth of many classes of deciduous trees 
and shiubs. 
It cannot be said that we have made so much progress 
during the last half-century in the direction of trees 
and shrubs as we have in other branches of horticulture ; 
indeed, I am inclined to think we have retrograded 
since Loudon’s time, when there was far more attention 
paid to ornamental arboriculture than at the present 
day. As evidence of this we have only to turn to the 
richness of tree-growth in old gardens, and compare it 
with the poverty of modern gardens. Fifty years ago, 
ownersof gardenswere far moreenthusiasticin thematter 
of planting, than they are now,stimulated as they were by 
this society, which at that time had the finest atboretuui 
in the world, from which was distributed, directly or 
indirectly', a large proportion of the magnificent trees 
which are now the admiration of all from Land’s End 
to John O’Groat’s. But, unhappily for British horti¬ 
culture, the famous arboretum at Chiswick vanished, 
and from that period it is not difficult to trace the 
decline of the public interest in tree-planting. We 
ought to be grateful to those early tree planters, for 
have they not bequeathed to us our present enjoyment 
of the magnificent trees that adorn old gardens, and 
which time alone can produce ? 
The result of this neglect of flowering trees and 
shrubs which now prevails is reflected, in gardens, for it 
is apparent to all who know anything of the subject, 
that modern gardens are neither so beautiful nor so 
interesting as old gardens. The commonplace aspect 
of more recently made gardens is in a great measure 
accounted for by their owners’ lack of interest, and by 
the want of knowledge on the part of their gardeners, 
to whom numbers of the beautiful old flowering trees 
and shrubs you see around you here to-day are practi¬ 
cally unknown. Moreover, the prevalent practice of 
employing nurserymen to lay out and plant gardens 
too often results in an insipid garden, as the temptation 
to plant the most easily propagated and quickly grown 
things is too great, and so, as a rule, only the ordinary 
varieties of flowering shrubs are planted instead of the 
newer and better sorts. 
As the demand for any class of plants obviously 
regulates the supply, the consequence of the neglect I 
complain of is that it does not pay nurserymen to keep 
a stock of the rarer trees and shrubs that are seldom 
asked for, so that it is a difficult matter now- to get 
young plants of rare trees early introduced. Some of 
our chief nurserymen have, however, been active in 
introducing new exotic trees and shiubs, and Conti¬ 
nental nurserymen are continually adding to their lists 
new and improved varieties obtained by the hybridist’s 
and raisei’s skill. We get nowadays improved or 
florists’ varieties of such things as the Lilac, Cydonia, 
Weigela, Hibiscus, aud Mock Orange, just as in former 
days they commenced to raise varieties of Rhododendron 
and Azalea ; and if only greater attention were paid to 
the subject in this country, and more encouragement 
to produce novelties, I am sure that as rapid strides 
would be made in the improvement of flowering shrubs 
as has been the case during recent years with hardy 
herbaceous plants. Since the days of Loudon—than ■ 
whom no one has done more to advance the knowledge 
of exotic trees — there has been made an enormous 
addition to the material which he wrote upon. From 
the far east we have obtained those beautiful Chinese 
and Japanese kinds that we see before us, while from 
California in the extreme west, and from Chili and New 
Zealand in the south, we have also reeeived numbers of 
trees and shrubs that were quite unknown to Loudon. 
Our Royal Horticultural Society, through Robert 
Fortune, has been instrumental in adding to this 
treasure ; while the names of Standish and Veitc’n in 
connection with Chinese, Japanese, and North and 
South American plants will be known as long as gar¬ 
dening lasts. Our national garden at Kew has always 
done much to enrich the country at large, while we owe 
not a little to our foreign friends, particularly those of 
the United States, who have not only sent us the rich 
flora of their great country, but have also been our 
intermediary in securing numerous eastern plants, a 
noteworthy example of which is before me, the 
chastely beautiful Magnolia stellata, or M. Halleana, 
as it is also called. 
Taking the old with the new, we have at the present 
day an immense resource of flowering trees and shrubs 
—a bewildering variety, I might say—so that the diffi¬ 
culty is to know how to employ it properly for the 
embellishment of our parks and gardens. What to 
plant and what to avoid is a subject of paramount 
importance to a landscape gardener, or to anyone who 
attempts to lay out and plant gardens so as to create 
the most tasteful effects under the ever-varying con¬ 
ditions of soil, climate, and situation. How to plant 
and how to cultivate trees and shrubs should form a 
prominent branch in the training of every man whose 
aim is to manage a garden well, be it public or private. 
The cultivation of trees and shiubs—that is, the proper 
selection, planting, renovating, pruning, and thinning 
—is carried out in very few even among the best private 
gardens in this country, the prevalent idea in the 
gardener’s mind beiDg that when once planted no tree 
or shrub should need further attention. But there is a 
great difference between cultivated trees and shrubs and 
those that receive no attention, as an example of which 
I need only' recall the magnificent specimens of Conifene 
in the gardens at Dropmoie (which old Philip Frost 
used to cultivate as carefully as he did his fruit trees) 
and the miserable, half-starved specimens of the same 
trees in the neighbourhood. Again, let us imagine for 
the moment a Weigela, Guelder Rose, Mock Orange, or 
Lilac that has been properly planted in good, deep soil, 
annually renovated by surface dressings, pruned in a 
rational way, and allowed free space on all sides to 
develop its long, arching shoots, which every year 
would be wreathed with bloom. Compare such a 
specimen with what one generally sees in an ordinary 
shrubbery, where the plants were at the outset planted 
so thickly that in two or three seasons they form a 
veritable j ungle of choked shrubs, each trying to thrust 
its head above the crowd, giving no pleasure to anyone 
who beholds it. The typical shrubbery in an Euglish 
garden is never cared for, never renovated, never 
pruned, until the time comes when the drastic remedy 
of destroying it and re-planting is applied. 
To bring out to the full the beauty of flowering trees 
and shrubs, they must be dealt with as attentively as 
a good gardener deals with an orchard. Groups of 
shrubs, or a shrubbery, should be well considered 
before planting. The aim should be to create as much 
variety as possible, both as regards the sky-line of the 
masses and the harmony of colour they will display 
when the plants assume their adult stage of growth, 
and this can only be done properly by those who have 
an intimate knowledge of the material with which they 
have to deal. If the shrubbery is intended for a screen, 
then thicker planting than otherwise is admissible ; 
but if the intention of the groups is to display to the 
fullest advantage the beauty of each shrub, then ample 
space muff be given to each, or, if planted thickly at 
first, timely thinning out should be done. It is 
advisable to plant shrubs of one species in groups of 
three or more, for then a fuller expression of that 
species can be obtained than by the ordinary, hap¬ 
hazard mixture, though obviously this can only be 
carried out in gardens of some considerable extent. 
Lawn groups of shrubs may be composed of one or 
more species ; but unless a shrub is of an elegant habit 
of growth—like a Weigela, for example—several kinds 
had better be grouped together in order to make a 
