When the planting season comes round, think of some of the good shrubs not yet in the garden, and forget pontic Rhododendron, Laurel, Aucuba, and Privet. By this is not meant rare shrubs, such as may only be had from the few nurseries of the very highest rank or from those that make rare shrubs a speciality, but good things that may be grown in any garden and that appear in all good shrub catalogues.
Perhaps no beautiful and now well-known shrub is more neglected than beautiful _Exochorda grandiflora_ (the Pearl Bush). Its near relatives, the Spiræas, are in every shrubbery, but one may go through twenty and not see Exochorda. Even of the Spiræas one does not half often see enough of _S. Thunbergi_, a perfect milky way of little starry bloom in April and a most shapely little bush, or the double-flowered _S. prunifolia_, with its long wreaths of flower-like double thorn or minute white roses and its autumn bravery of scarlet foliage. The hardy Magnolias are not given the opportunity they deserve of making our gardens lovely in earliest summer. Who that has seen _Magnolia stellata_ in its April dress of profuse white bloom and its summer and autumn dignity of handsome though not large foliage, would endure to be without it? or who would not desire to have the fragrant chalices of _M. soulangeana_, with their outside staining of purple, and _M. conspicua_, of purest white in the early months of March and April? And why does not every garden hold one, at least, of the sweet _Chimonanthus_, offering, as it does in February, an abundance of its little blooms of a fragrance so rich and powerful that it can be scarcely matched throughout the year?
[Illustration: _A GROUPING OF MAGNOLIA STELLATA._]
_Cassinia fulvida_, still known in nurseries by its older name of Diplopappus, in winter wears its fullest dress of tiny gold-backed leafage in long graceful sprays, that are borne in such profusion that they only beg to be cut to accompany the rare flowers of winter that we bring indoors to sweeten and enliven our rooms.
Of small-flowering trees none is lovelier than the Snowy Mespilus (_Amelanchier_), and for a tree of somewhat larger size the good garden form of the native Bird Cherry is beautiful in the early year. The North American _Halesia_ (the Snowdrop Tree) should be in every garden, either as a bush or tree, every branch hung in May with its full array of pendent bloom of the size and general shape of Snowdrops, only of a warm and almost creamy instead of a cold snow-white colour.