in the winter season, or indeed at any other season, one of the most melancholy things to be seen in our parks and gardens are the long, bare, naked shrubberies, extending, as along the bayswater road, more or less for a mile in a place; the soil greasy, black, seamed with the mutilated roots of the poor shrubs and trees; which are none the better, but very much the worse, for the cruel annual attention of digging up their young roots without returning any adequate nourishment or good to the soil. culturally, the whole thing is suicidal, both for trees and plants. the mere fact of men having to pass through one[112] of those shrubberies every autumn, and, as they fancy, “prune” and otherwise attend to unfortunate shrubs and low trees, leads to this, and especially to the shrubs taking the appearance of inverted besoms. thus a double wrong is done, and at great waste of labour. any interesting life that might be in the ground is destroyed, and the whole appearance of the shrubbery is made hideous from the point of view of art; all good culture of flowering or evergreen shrubs destroyed or made impossible. this system is an orthodox one, that has descended to us from other days, the popular idea being that the right thing to do in autumn is to dig the shrubbery. the total abolition of this system, and the adoption of the one to be presently described, would lead to the happiest revolution ever effected in gardening, and be a perfectly easy, practicable means for the abolition of the inverted besoms, and the choke–muddle shrubbery, and these awful wastes of black soil and mutilated roots.
two ideas should be fixed in the mind of the improver, the one being to allow all the beautiful shrubs to assume their natural shapes, either singly or in groups, with sufficient space between to allow of their fair development, so that the shrubbery might, in the flowering season, or indeed at all seasons, be the best kind of conservatory—a beautiful winter garden even, with the branches of most of the shrubs touching the ground, no mutilation whatever visible, and no hard dug line outside the shrubs. this last improvement could easily be effected by forming a natural fringe, so to say, by breaking up the usual hard edge from good planting; by letting, in fact, the edge be formed by well–furnished shrubs projected beyond the hard line, and running in and out as they do on a[113] hill copse, or as the box bushes sometimes do on a sussex down. here care, variety in selection, taste and skill in grouping, so as to allow different subjects, whether placed singly or in groups, or little groves, being in a position where they may grow well and be seen to advantage, would lead to the most charming results in the open–air garden. with sufficient preparation at first, such shrubberies would be the cause of very little trouble afterwards.
now, such beauty could be obtained without any further aid from other plants; and in many cases it might be desirable to consider the trees and shrubs and their effect only, and let the turf spread in among them; but we have the privilege of adding to this beautiful tree and shrub life another world of beauty—the bulbs and herbaceous plants, and innumerable beautiful things which go to form the ground flora, so to say, of northern and temperate countries, and which light up the world with loveliness in meadow or copse, or wood or alpine pasture in the flowering season. the surface which is dug and wasted in all our parks, and in numbers of our gardens, should be occupied with this varied life; not in the miserable old mixed border fashion, with each plant stuck up with a stick, but with the plants in groups and colonies between the shrubs. in the spaces where turf would not thrive, or where it might be troublesome to keep fresh, we should have irises, or narcissi, or lupines, or french willows, or japan anemones, or any of scores of other lovely things which people cannot now find a place for in our stiff gardens. the soil which now does little work, and in which the tree–roots every year are mercilessly dug up, would support myriads of lovely plants. the necessity of[114] allowing abundant space to the shrubs and trees, both in the young and the adult stage, gives us some space to deal with, which may be occupied with weeds if we do not take care of it. the remedy, then, is to replace the weed by a beautiful flower, and to let some handsome hardy plant of the northern world occupy each little space; keeping it clean for us, and, at the same time, repaying us by abundant bloom, or fine foliage or habit. this system in the first place allows the shrubs themselves to cover the ground to a great extent. in the london parks now every shrub is cut under so as to allow the digger to get near it; and this leads to the most comical and villainous of shapes ever assumed by bushes. even the lilac bushes, which we see so horribly stiff, will cover the ground with their branches if allowed room enough; therefore, to a great extent, we should have the branches themselves covering the ground instead of what we now see. but open spaces, little bays and avenues running in among the shrubs, are absolutely essential, if we want to fully enjoy what ought to be the beautiful inhabitants of our shrub garden. such openings offer delightful retreats for hardy flowers, many of which thrive better in semi–shady spots than they do in the open, while the effect of the flowers is immeasurably enhanced by the foliage of the shrubs around. to carry out this plan well, one should have, if possible, a good selection of the shrubs to begin with, although the plainest shrubbery, which is not overgrown or overcrowded, may be embellished with hardy plants on the ground. the plan may be adopted in the case of new shrubberies being formed, or in the case of old ones; though the old ones are frequently so dried up and overcrowded that great alterations[115] would have to be made here and there. in the case of young shrubberies it is, of course, necessary at first to keep the surface open for a while until the shrubs have taken hold of the ground; then the interesting colonies to which we alluded may be planted.
an essential thing is to abolish utterly the old dotting principle of the mixed border, as always ugly and always bad from a cultural point of view. instead of sticking a number of things in one place, with many labels, and graduating them from the back to the front, so as to secure the stiffest imaginable kind of arrangement, the true way is to have in each space wide colonies or groups of one kind, or more than one[116] kind. here is a little bay, for example, with the turf running into it, a handsome holly feathered to the turf forming one promontory, and a spreading evergreen barberry, with its fine leaves also touching the ground, forming the other. as the turf passes in between those two it begins to be colonised with little groups of the pheasant’s–eye narcissus, and soon in the grass is changed into a waving meadow of these fair flowers and their long grayish leaves. they carry the eye in among the other shrubs, and perhaps carry it to some other colony of a totally different plant behind—an early and beautiful boragewort, say, with its bright blue flowers, also in a spreading colony. some might say, your flowers of narcissi only last a certain time; how are you going to replace them? the answer is, that they occupy, and beautifully embellish, a place that before was wholly naked, and worse than naked, and in this position we contend that our narcissi should be seen in all their stages of bud and bloom and decay without being hurried out of the world as soon as their fair bloom is over, as they are on the border or in the greenhouse. they are worth growing if we only secure this one beautiful aspect of vegetation where before all was worse than lost. we also secure plenty of cut flowers without troubling the ordinary resources of the garden.
we might then pass on to another, of the german iris, occupying not only a patch, but a whole clump; for these enormous london parks of ours have acres and acres on every side of this greasy dug earth which ought to sparkle with flowers; and, therefore, a very fine plant might be seen to a large extent. and how much better for the gardener or cultivator to have to deal with one in one[117] place than be tormented with a hundred little “dots” of flowers—alpine, rock, wood, copse, or meadow plants—all mixed up in that usually wretched soup called the “mixed border”! no plants that require staking ought to be used in the way we are speaking of. day lilies, for example, are good plants. in some bold opening what a fine effect we could get by having a spreading colony of these therein; scores of plants might be named, that want no sticking, for such places. each plant having a sufficient space and forming its own colony, there is much less doubt in case of alterations as to what should be done. in fact, in the case of an intelligent cultivator, there should be no doubt. observe the advantage of this plan. instead of seeing the same plants everywhere, we should pass on from narcissi to iris, from iris to bluebell, and thus meet with a different kind of vegetation in each part of the park or garden, instead of the eternal monotony of privet and long dreary line of “golden–feather” everywhere. the same kind of variety, as suggested for the flowers, should be seen among the shrubs. the sad planter’s mixture—privet, laurel, etc.—taking all the colour and all the life and charm out of the shrubbery, should be avoided; so, too, the oppressive botanical business, with everything labelled, and plants classified out of doors as they are in an herbarium. they should be put where they would look well and grow best. well carried out, such a system would involve labour, and, above all things, taste at first; but it would eventually resolve itself into the judicious removal of interloping weeds. the labour that is now given to dig and mutilate once a year and keep clean at other times of the year would easily, on the plan proposed, suffice for a much[118] larger area. more intelligence would certainly be required. any ignorant man can dig around and mutilate a shrub and chop up a white lily if he meets it! but any person taught to distinguish between our coarse native weeds and the beautiful plants we want to establish, passing round now and then, would keep all safe.
on a large scale, in the london parks, such a plan would be impossible to carry out without a nursery garden; that is to say, the things wanted should be in such abundance, that making the features of the kind we suggest would be easy to the superintendent. the acres and acres of black surface should themselves afford here and there a little ground where the many hardy plants adapted for this kind of gardening might be placed and increased. this, supposing that a real want of the public gardens of london—a large and well–managed nursery in the pure air—is never carried out: the wastefulness of buying everything they want—even the commonest things—is a costly drawback to our london public gardens. at the very least we should have 100 acres of nursery gardens for the planting and replanting of the london parks. so, too, there ought to be intelligent labour to carry out this artistic planting; and with the now–awakened taste for some variety in the garden, one cannot doubt that a few years will give us a race of intelligent young men, who know a little of the plants that grow in northern countries, and whose mental vision is not begun and ended by the ribbon border.
the treatment of the margin of the shrubbery is a very important point here. at present it is stiff—the shrubs cut in or the trees cut in, and an unsightly border running[119] straight along, perhaps with a tile edging. well, the right way is to have a broken margin, to let the shrubs run in and out themselves, and let them form the margin; let them come to the ground in fact, not stiffly, and here and there growing right outside the ordinary boundary, in a little group. throw away altogether the crowded masses of starved privet and pruned laurel, and let the turf pass right under a group of fine trees where such are found. this turf itself might be dotted in spring with snowdrops and early flowers; nothing, in fact, would be easier than for any intelligent person, who knew and cared for trees and shrubs, to change the monotonous wall of shrubbery into the most delightful of open–air gardens; abounding in beautiful life, from the red tassels on the topmost maples to flowers in the grass for children.
