And in the midsummer
Coolness and shade."
That is a beautiful description of a perfect friend, but it might serve equally as a description of a perfect garden. The flowers of July are infinite in their number and exquisite in their beauty, yet, if they are grown in a large, tidy, treeless, shrubless garden, they will yield but little pleasure. A garden is not a place merely for the exhibition of floral wonders, but a place wherein to rest, to talk, to read or to dream. With the blazing sun of July beating on one's unshaded head, dreaming, resting, and reading are equally uncomfortable and unprofitable.
A shade-giving tree is worth all the flowers of midsummer, though fortunately one is not called upon to sacrifice either. Trees and shrubs yield welcome shade, but, quite apart from this, they help to throw up, and provide suitable backgrounds for, the dwarfer plants which make up the majority of our garden contents. We have been too fond of cutting down trees, and many a suburb has reason to regret the revision of the old forest law of King William: "Gif the forestier or wiridier finds anie man without the principall wode, but sit within the pale, heueand dune ane aik tree, he sould attack him."
According to our soil and site, must we select the shrubs and trees which will be happiest under the conditions we can offer them. When we have ample space, no trees can surpass in beauty our native deciduous trees, such as the oak and hornbeam; but it is from the smaller trees and larger shrubs that owners of more moderately-sized gardens must chiefly look for shade and backgrounds. Japan has given us many things of infinite value, but few more precious than the white-flowering species of Styrax. The dense, bright foliage, the sweetly-scented, snow-white bells, and the general habit of the tree render Styrax obassia one of the most valuable constituents of a garden. Japan, too, has given us a number of Maples which afford a feast of colour unrivalled by any other group of trees in the world. They are worth trying in any mild or protected situation, though they should be planted on a small, experimental scale at first as they do not thrive everywhere. They seem to like partial shade and a north aspect. Those who have mild and weather-favoured situations may glory in the fragrant and—when well grown—handsome Magnolias, though with these again success is not to be fore-counted a certainty. But few are so badly placed but they may grow the Lilacs, Laburnums, Hawthorns, Guelder Roses, Spiræas, Dogwoods, Weeping Birches, Weeping Willows, and Flowering Currants. As decorative as most, however, and more useful than any, of the shrubs and trees worth growing in a garden, are the apples and pears, medlars and quinces, plums and cherries whose flowers and fruits have always impressed the traveller as a beautiful feature of English landscape.
Beneath the shade of deciduous trees there are many plants which will live healthy and flowery lives. In the spring we have for such situations the great array of bulbs, together with many of the Primroses, Sweet Woodruff, Hepaticas, Hellebores, Fair maids of France, Doronicums, and other early bloomers; and, even when the trees are in full leaf, we may enjoy, if the soil be but properly prepared, such pleasant flowers as those of the Martagon Lily and Lilium speciosum, Campanulas, both dwarf and tall, Foxgloves, Knotweeds, and Columbines; whilst ferns of many kinds, together with several of the Saxifrages and Megaseas, and such plants as Acanthus mollis and the herbaceous Geranium, all help to produce the pleasant effect which is yielded by the draping of the floor of coppice or of forest. When the shade is so dense and the soil so poor that even these plants will not thrive, we may fall back on Ivy, Creeping Jenny, and Periwinkle; though, where the soil is enriched with old leafmould and manure and properly dug, no shade of trees is too dense for many of the ferns, both deciduous and evergreen.
[SOILS AND THEIR PREPARATION]
Many people imagine that in some mysterious fashion plants eat soil much as we eat beef-steak; and that, all soil being just "soil," one has but to make a hole in the ground and thrust the roots of a plant into it, in order to make the desert bloom as the rose. This idea is incorrect, just as was the idea of a Devonshire farmer whom I once saw feeding his month-old baby with cheese and cider. "Feed 'un on milk?" said he. "I'd zooner gee 'un zope-zuds. Let 'un 'ave summat wi' zum strength in't."