The use of evergreens is becoming yearly more and more appreciated, both as effective in ornamental planting and as an item of practical economy in the matter of hedges and screens for protection of half hardy plants, orchards, or buildings from cold and harsh winds and storms.

In ornamental planting their use is often very imperfectly understood, and many places are rendered gloomy and dark from their too free use in the foreground, or immediately about the house. There is a great deal of beauty in evergreens, but as a class for effective scenery creative of varied beauty, they have not the qualities that are embraced in the changing character from month to month of deciduous trees. For perfect scenery, however, covering the entire year, it would be impossible to dispense with evergreens. If used judiciously in arrangement, sparingly in the foreground, and using those of the lightest and most vivid shades of green in foliage, grouping them at the same time with mountain ash, euonymus or strawberry tree, etc., with their red clusters of fruit in winter, and massing the background with varieties of dark foliage, great effect may be produced, and a pleasant life-like character given to grounds 7 that otherwise in the winter season would be barren and dreary.

Some few years since, many regarded the transplanting of evergreens as one of the difficult items in arboriculture, requiring the skill and experience of a practical gardener. It was also counted unsafe to move them except at particular seasons of the year, or with balls of earth attached, and a few planters yet hold to these early views; but those of more practice find that it is no more difficult to transplant an evergreen when taken from the nursery than to perform the same operation with any deciduous tree. It is true there are exceptions among evergreens, some proving more difficult than others, but the instances or kinds are not more numerous than with deciduous trees.

In transplanting, it is only requisite to remember that the tree has its leaves on, and that there is consequently a constant demand upon the roots for evaporation, and therefore it will not do to permit them to get dry. With small-sized trees, a root nearly corresponding with the top is generally procured when the trees have been rightly grown in the nursery, and cutting in the top is unnecessary; but in the case of removal of trees six feet or more in height, unless extraordinary care is taken, a great reduction of root is the result, and then it is advisable always to shorten in the length of the branches corresponding with the apparent loss of roots the tree has sustained.

A very great variety of evergreens have been introduced during the past fifteen or twenty years, but of them few have proved of a hardihood or beauty to command notice as trees for popular use, and as in these pages we write for the general public rather than for a few amateurs, we shall only describe such as may be safely depended upon in all locations.

Popular Evergreen Trees #1

[Continued From April Number.]

Popular Evergreen Trees #2

A timely article; I am glad to see you favor our noble White Pine. That and the Hemlock, because common, have been almost discarded by fancy planters of late years, and yet they are two trees without which no extensive place can really be called complete. Your remarks on the use of evergreens in the foreground are correct, but not half strong enough. I have in mind now several places where large growing dark evergreens fill up the foreground, destroying its openness of character, while the rear of the house is a level flat, devoid of everything ornamental except a woodshed! Half the number of trees taken from the front and placed in situation at distances not less than fifty feet from the house, in the rear, would lighten up the front, and give breadth, extent, and character to the whole.