Abstract
CONIFERS, like ferns, stove-plants, orchids, alpines, and the ignoble carpet-bedding, have had their high tide of popularity. The fashion for them owed its origin chiefly to the work of the collectors Jeffrey and William Lobb in western North America in the middle of last century, and to that of John Gould Veitch in Japan in the early “sixties.” From these areas, especially the former, our gardens have obtained their noblest conifers. We are told that, from fifty to seventy years ago, so keen was the desire to plant them that many beautiful flowering trees were destroyed to provide the necessary space, and that gardens in general lost much of their brightness and seasonal charm by the displacement of deciduous trees in favour of the heavier, gloomy, unchanging conifers. Inevitably, the craze came to an end, for a good proportion of them were found to need particular conditions which many localities where they were planted did not provide; and there is no more distressing object in the garden than a sickly conifer. In course of time the pendulum swung so much in the opposite direction that conifers in recent years have been overmuch neglected.
Conifers and their Characteristics.
By Charles Coltman-Rogers. Pp. xiii + 333. (London: John Murray, 1920.) Price 21s. net.
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Conifers and their Characteristics . Nature 106, 563 (1920). https://doi.org/10.1038/106563a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/106563a0