The Garden Beautiful Author:William Robinson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III HOME WOODS At the beautiful gate of the woods one happiness awaits us, in being free from vain considerations about ' styles'. Our home wood sh... more »ould be only a nobler kind of garden, and may be so treated without spoiling its value as a wood. We may see on a spring day in one place more beauty in a wood than in any garden, from the bushes and plants wild in the place: Furze, Crab, Cowslip, Wood Hyacinth, Primrose on northern slopes, Marsh Marigold in wet copses, and Sloe. But this great beauty often has to be sought through briery paths and dense underwood, and the best of it is not easily brought into relation to the home grounds. In many country places, where people labour for years with a wretched stereotyped kind of garden, they take no trouble to see the beauty of the wild things that grow near naturally and without cost or care. The supreme beauty of our native trees is often a sealed book to them, while they perhaps spend time and money on trees that are tender, ugly, and useless in our land either for wood or garden. The wood is a mighty worker for man, a precious gift of beauty as well as profit. For the wood, unlike the farm, wants few costly labourers, no weeding or ploughing, finds its own fertilizers, its own watering, its own shade and shelter, all this and much more, and without the aid of the colleges now thought necessary to make the good gardener or farmer. If all the wit of man,backed by all the learning of the colleges, were on one side and a wood of our best native trees on the other, the wood would certainly give a better return than could be got from any labour or capital applied to the same class of land in other ways. Evergreen woods for beauty. Even in the most frequented lines of country we often see the ugliness which results from ...« less