House and Garden 
IN ITS DEATH A BOWER FOR WILD VINES 
way of irregularity, and makes “ pictures ” 
that call out the cameras with exclamations 
of delight on the part of the amateur who 
suddenly realizes what “ just an old cedar” 
can do. But who has not been touched with 
it in its most ludicrously formal shape, its 
most conventional aspect, bare as a pole lor 
most of its height, with a conical crown, lor 
all the world like a toy tree from some Noah’s 
Ark (“made in Germajny ”) trimmed up 
to suit the convenience of an unemotional 
son of the soil ? Even then it compels a 
pleased interest and charms by reason 
of childhood memories and he who would 
scoff at this rigid artificial manifestation is 
hard-hearted indeed ! But leaving extremes 
out, its familiar and more regular forms of 
ample pyramid and tapering spire afford all 
the variation legitimate landscape art can ask. 
Sometimes as appressed and thin as if some 
austere Lombardy Poplar, while at other 
times broadly spread out, rotund, with many 
tufts and turrets it even simulates with great 
lateral branches the effuse effects of the hem¬ 
locks and bulks large in a protected fence 
corner as the feature of the farm, attended 
ever by companions that wait in slenderer 
grace upon its dominance. Never funereal, 
growing in untoward places but to redeem 
them and throwing a benison of green shade 
over all the surroundings, its choice of home 
and farm for its best ministrations makes it 
the “ tree of life ; ” and even in its death, it 
often stands a bower for the wild vines that 
dower it again with foliage and beauty as if 
in tribute to some dryad bereft of a home ! 
The combinations it makes, for effects 
of contrast in color and design, in finesse of 
tree-form as one finds them in nature, are 
most interesting and ever picturesque. Who 
has not seen the wild grape ( Vit is aestivalis), 
the Virginia creeper ( Ampelopsis quinquefolia), 
the poison ivy {Rhus toxicodendron ), flinging 
their gonfalons from the Juniper’s friendly 
turrets, in richly contrasted greens in the 
summer winds, but surpassing anything the 
foreign maker of gardens knows when the 
gorgeous dyes of autumn stain their foliage 
and the dark bronze green of the host is the 
woof on which is thrown the flaunting scar¬ 
lets, crimsons, maroons, oranges and ochres 
of the guests. But the cedar clump would 
be poor indeed it only the grape, the creeper 
and the poison-ivy were part of the deco¬ 
rative scheme—its only landscape symbiosis. 
THE JUNIPER COMBINED WITH OTHER 
WOODLAND TREES 
127 
