Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BOOK II. ORNAMENTAL TREES OF LESS GROWTH. The Arbutus, Or Strawberry-tree. The Strawberry-tree is an apt appellation for this shrub, for the fruit exactly resembles a strawberry, and it is also of an agreeable acid taste. This shrub is a most suitable subject for single specimens or for mixed shrubberies, but it should be planted where it can display its beauty, which consists in the peculiar feature of possessing flowers and ripe red fruit at one and the same time. The flowers are as much like Lily- of-the-Valley bells as anything, and are very good in bouquets for vases. This shrub should be cut back frequently, as it is very liable to get barren below. It may be raised from seed, which should be washed out of the pulp, dried thoroughly, and sown in the month of February or March in deep seed-pans filled firmly with fine sandy peat and maiden loam. The pans should be well- drained, the compost pressed in up to within half an inch of the rim, made even, and the seed sown moderately thick over the surface, and then covered one quarter of an inch with finer-sifted soil of the same sort. The pans containing the seed should be set on a gentle bottom heat in a frame or pit until the plants appear. They should then be hardened off for a week and shifted into a cold pit or frame, and shaded from the strong heat of the sun. for a month, when the pans THE YEW. 29 may be removed and set behind or under a north wall, or some shady spot for the summer. The seedlings may be pricked out into other pans or pots, or potted off singly into small pots in the following spring, and finally planted out into beds. The soil best suited for growing the Arbutus in is one of peat or good maiden loam. There are several A7arieties, but the Uncdo is the best on account of the abundance of i...