, and, at every turn,
some rugged Yew, or clump of red-stemmed Scotch Fir, or tapering Spruce
with hanging russet cones, will stay our steps, and if we look and
listen, they will tell us in their own way the story of their perfect
fitness for our homely English landscape. Or, if we chance to be in one
of the chalky districts of the South Downs, we may come upon Box, the
ever young, as it was called of yore, or Juniper, in its bloom of silver
grey, as precious as any, to add to the tale of our best native
evergreens.

Now it is to a wise choice of evergreens and to their rightful placing
that we must look for the basis of our content in the winter garden. The
insight of our forefathers foresaw the solid comfort of the rampart of
Yew which was fostered of old in many a manor-house garden. It caused
them to fence about their dwellings on north and east with a belt of
sturdy timber trees, to meet and ward off in their pliant strength the
roughest winter gales. It planned the sheltered nut-walk and the
pleached alley and the cosy settle, carved out of the thick Box bushes,
on the grassy verge of the bowling-green. They took of the materials at
hand, and many have since their day blessed the foresight which planted,
not only for themselves, but for their children's children. That they
were not blind to the rare beauty of foreign trees many a magnificent
Cedar of Lebanon and massive Holm Oak or deciduous tree--like the fine
Tulip trees at Mackery End, beloved of Charles Lamb--bear noble
testimony to this hour.

Nothing, perhaps, in the wide range of garden beauty is more pictorial
than an ancient Cedar, dusky and glaucous, with cavernous shadows,
holding upright the smooth, pale-brown, rounded cones on its flattened
branches, or some grand Silver Fir standing alone in its solemn
symmetrical beauty, or even, as may now and then be seen, though rarely,
some stately Araucaria, wind-sheltered, whose radiating branches sweep
down upon the greensward. Others there are, no less pictorial perhaps,
nor even less exacting, for none can do without the shelter of a good
position, such as the Stone Pines, with corrugated trunk and green
spreading head; or again, the graceful fragrant Cypress (_C.
lawsoniana_) of more recent date, with its slender pyramidal growth and
drooping feathery branches, taking on at the close of winter the
ruby-red of the catkins which tell of the coming of the small,
bloom-powdered cones.

The desperate hurry,