Trees and Shrubs for English Gardens

by E. T. Cook

CLEMATIS MONTANA OVER ROUGH WALL.

One of the most important of our climbing shrubs, the Wistaria, makes grand growth in all the south of England. This also can be used to excellent effect trained into some rather thinly-furnished tree such as an old Acacia. Its grey snake-like stems and masses of bloom high up in the supporting tree are shown to excellent effect. This is also a fine plant for a pergola. A few plants growing free and rambling full length would, after the first few years, when they are getting old, cover a pergola from end to end. The piers or posts could also be covered with the same, for though the nature of the plant is to ramble, yet if kept to one stem and closely pruned it readily adapts itself to pillar form, and bears a wonderful quantity of bloom.

CLEMATIS MONTANA OVER ARCHWAY.

Among the Grape Vines there is a great variety of ways of use other than the stiff wall training they generally receive. If they are wanted for fruit they must be pruned, but most outdoor Vines are grown for the beauty of their foliage. Here is another first-class pergola plant, making dense leafy shade, and growing in a way that is delightfully pictorial. Nothing looks better rambling over old buildings. Now that so many once prosperous farms are farms no longer, and that their dwelling-houses are being converted to the use of another class of occupier, the rough out-buildings, turned into stabling, and adapted for garden sheds, often abut upon the new-made pleasure-garden. This is the place where the Vines may be so well planted. If the main stem only is trained or guided it is well to leave the long branches to shift for themselves, for they will ramble and dispose themselves in so pictorial a way that the whole garden is bettered by their rioting grandeur of leaf mass.

Aristolochia Sipho, with its twining stems and handsome leaves, will, like the Vine and the Virginian Creeper, answer to all these uses of jungle-like growth among trees and shrubs and free climbing in hedge, over pergola or rough building.

The employment of the climbing and rambling Roses is also now understood for all such uses, and the illustration shows the value of the Dutch Honeysuckle for this purpose.

A rough hedge containing perhaps only a few Thorns and Hollies and stub Oaks, and a filling of Wild Brambles, may be made glorious with the free hardy climbers just guided into the bushes and then left to ramble as they will.

In the growth of the rarer and most distinct and beautiful of climbing shrubs one must in the main be guided by the natural surroundings of soil and shelter or by climatic conditions. In the cold midland and northern districts of England we have seen common Laurels and many Roses killed to the ground during severe winters.

In Hampshire, Devon, and Cornwall, and in many other isolated and sheltered nooks near the sea in England south of the Thames, many so-called cool greenhouse plants often grow and thrive luxuriantly in the open air. This is also true of many localities in the south and west of Ireland, such as Fota, Cork, Bantry, and Tralee, where New Zealand, Japanese, Californian, and many Chilian shrubs are quite happy in the open air. Nearly all visitors to Glengarriff notice the luxuriance of the Fuchsias, which, not being cut down there every winter by severe frosts, assume more or less of a tree-like aspect, and are literally one mass of brilliant coral-red flowers during summer and autumn. But it is even more wonderful to see there growing up the front of the hotels and elsewhere such plants as Maurandya, Lophospermum, Mikania, and Cape Pelargoniums year after year. But, apart from mild climates, aspect has an enormous effect on many climbing shrubs, and especially on light dry soils. Lapageria, for example, prefers a northern exposure, and the same is true of Berberidopsis corallina, and the remarkable Mutisia decurrens. Many climbers and trailers, again, are hardy on north or north-western walls that are ruined by bright sunshine after frost, which is often experienced on south and especially south-western exposures. Even when climbers like Wistaria, Jasminum nudiflorum, Ceanothus, Pyrus and many others are perfectly hardy on sunny walls it is often a great advantage to train a few branches over the top of the wall to the shady side, as in these cases there is a week or ten days or more difference in the time of blooming, and so an agreeable succession is obtained.