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W. Robinson
The Subtropical Garden; or, beauty of form in the flower garden
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066153656
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION AND GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS.
INTRODUCTION AND GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS.
SPECIES AND VARIETIES OF CANNA.
PART III. SELECTIONS OF PLANTS FOR VARIOUS PURPOSES IN THE SUBTROPICAL GARDEN.
SELECTIONS OF PLANTS FOR VARIOUS PURPOSES.
PREFACE.
THIS book is written with a view to assist the newly-awakened taste for something more than mere colour in the flower-garden, by enumerating, describing, indicating the best positions for, and giving the culture of, all our materials for what is called “subtropical gardening.” This not very happy, not very descriptive name, is adopted from its popularity only; fortunately for our gardens numbers of subjects not from subtropical climes may be employed with great advantage. Subtropical gardening means the culture of plants with large and graceful or remarkable foliage or habit, and the association of them with the usually low-growing and brilliant flowering-plants now so common in our gardens, and which frequently eradicate every trace of beauty of form therein, making the flower-garden a thing of large masses of colour only.
The guiding aim in this book has been the selection of really suitable subjects, and the rejection of many that have been recommended and tried for this purpose. This point is more important than at first sight would appear, for in most of the literature hitherto devoted to the subject plants entirely unsuitable are named. Thus we find such things as Alnus glandulosa aurea and Ulmus campestris aurea (a form of the common elm) enumerated among subtropical plants by one author. Manifestly if these are admissible almost every species of plant is equally so. These belong to a class of variegated hardy subjects that have been in our gardens for ages, and have nothing whatever to do with subtropical gardening. Two other classes have also purposely been omitted: very tender stove-plants, many of which have been tried in vain in the Paris and London Parks, and such things as Echeveria secunda, which though belonging to a type frequently enumerated among subtropical plants, are, more properly, subjects of the bedding class. But if I have excluded many that I know to be unsuitable, every type of the vegetation of northern and temperate countries has been searched for valuable kinds; and as no tropical or subtropical subject that is really effective has been omitted, the result is the most complete selection that is possible from the plants now in cultivation.
No pains have been spared to show by the aid of illustrations the beauty of form displayed by the various types of plants herein enumerated. For some of the illustrations I have to thank MM. Vilmorin and Andrieux, the well-known Parisian firm; for others, the proprietors of the ‘Field;’ while the rest are from the graceful pencil of Mr. Alfred Dawson, and engraved by Mr. Whymper and Mr. W. Hooper. I felt that engravings would be of more than their usual value in this book, inasmuch as they place the best attainable result before the reader’s eye, thus enabling him to arrange his materials more efficiently. A small portion of the matter of this book originally appeared in my book on the gardens of Paris, in which it will not again be printed. For the extensive list of the varieties of Canna I am indebted to M. Chatè’s “Le Canna.” Most of the subjects have been described from personal knowledge of them, both in London and Paris gardens.
W. R.
April 3, 1871.
PART I.
INTRODUCTION AND GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS.
SUBTROPICAL GARDENING.
INTRODUCTION AND GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS.
The system of garden-decoration popularly known as “Subtropical,” and which simply means the use in gardens of plants having large and handsome leaves, noble habit, or graceful port, has taught us the value of grace and verdure amid masses of low, brilliant, and unrelieved flowers, and has reminded us how far we have diverged from Nature’s ways of displaying the beauty of vegetation, our love for rude colour having led us to ignore the exquisite and inexhaustible way in which plants are naturally arranged. In a wild state brilliant blossoms are usually relieved by a setting of abundant green; and even where mountain and meadow plants of one kind produce a wide blaze of colour at one season, there is intermingled a spray of pointed grass and other leaves, which tone down the mass and quite separate it from anything shown by what is called the “bedding system” in gardens. When we come to examine the most charming examples of our own indigenous or any other wild vegetation, we find that their attraction mainly depends on flower and fern,