CONIFERS GROWN IN A SUBURBAN GARDENS. 159
a light-demanding tree; when growing close, the trees soon lose
their lower boughs, and between their crowns sufficient light
passes down to admit an undergrowth of brambles, bracken or
bluebells; in Scotland, where only in the British Isles the tree
is now truly native, the pines form majestic forests, while be-
neath them grow beds of deep moss, with bilberry, cowberry,
and bearberry bushes.
The taste for growing foreign conifers in our gardens is a com-
paratively modern one. As late as the end of the 18th century,
few kinds were cultivated in England. William Aiton, one of
the three able men who helped the Dowager Princess Augusta to
lay out the new Botanic Gardens at Kew, gave an account of
the 5,600 foreign plants introduced into England up to the year
1789; only 37 of these were conifers.
In the list of conifers grown at Kew in 1903, 246 species
and 451 varieties are enumerated, to which a number more have
been added during the succeeding seventeen years, forming
the present magnificent collection there. The taste for planting
conifers in private gardens seems to have sprung up about ninety
years ago, and soon increased so much that it became the fashion
for the gentry who took a proper pride in their garden to set apart
a special portion for a "pinetum," in which many species of
coniferous trees were planted. Collectors in various parts of
the world, especially in North America, were exploring fresh dis-
tricts, and sent home seeds of new conifers, which were distributed
among those who knew best how to rear young plants; hence
it comes about that we have inherited many pineta, where num-
bers of these trees have now grown to a stately size, fully justi-
fying the hopes of those who planted them. The fashion for
pineta waned somewhat as time went on, but it has revived of
late years as the result, partly of many fresh species of conifer
having been recently discovered in China and elsewhere, and
partly from the desire to improve the very unsatisfactory posi-
tion of forestry in the British Isles.
Probably the nurseryman's habit of using such trees as
"Monkey Puzzles" and Lawson's Cypress, in laying out series
of small gardens along new roads, dates from the middle of the
last century, when the growing of conifers was generally popular,
but it is now fast dying out, and with the increasing practice of
the owner's cultivating his or her own garden, a more approp-
riate selection of plants is made.