valign="top">Melianthus major

155 Monstera deliciosa 156 Montagnæa heracleifolia 157 Morina longifolia 158 Mulgedium alpinum 159 Musa Ensete 160 Nicotiana Tabacum 163 Onopordum Acanthium 164 Poa fertilis 174 Rheum Emodi 178 Rhus glabra laciniata 180 Seaforthia elegans 185 Solanum robustum 190 Solanum Warscewiczii 195 Uhdea bipinnatifida 205 Wigandia macrophylla 208 Yucca filamentosa 212 Yucca pendula 214 Yucca filamentosa variegata 217

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, trailer, shrub, and tree, sheltering, supporting, relieving and beautifying each other, so that the whole array has an indefinite tone, and the mind is satisfied with the refreshing mystery of the arrangement.

We may be pleased by the wide spread of purple on a heath or mountain, but when we go near and examine it in detail, we find that its most exquisite aspect is seen in places where the long moss cushions itself beside the ling, and the fronds of the Polypody peer forth around little masses of heather. Everywhere we see Nature judicious in the arrangement of her highest effects, setting them in clouds of verdant leafage, so that monotony is rarely produced—a state of things which it is highly desirable to attain as far as possible in the garden.

We cannot attempt to reproduce this literally—nor would it be wise or convenient to do so—but assuredly herein will be found the chief source of true beauty and interest in our gardens as well as in those of Nature; and the more we keep this fact before our eyes, the nearer will be our approach to truth and success.

Nature in puris naturalibus we cannot have in our gardens, but Nature’s laws should not be violated; and few human beings have contravened them more than our flower-gardeners during the past twenty years. We should compose from Nature, as landscape artists do. We may have in our gardens—and without making wildernesses of them either—all the shade, the relief, the grace, the beauty, and nearly all the irregularity of