The Subtropical Garden

This book is written with a view to assist the newly-awakened taste for something more than mere colour in the flower-garden, by enumerating, describing, indicating the best positions for, and giving the culture of, all our materials for what is called “subtropical gardening.” This not very happy, not very descriptive name, is adopted from its popularity only, fortunately for our gardens numbers of subjects not from subtropical climes may be employed with great advantage. Subtropical gardening means the culture of plants with large and graceful or remarkable foliage or habit, and the association of them with the usually low-growing and brilliant flowering-plants now so common in our gardens, and which frequently eradicate every trace of beauty of form therein, making the flower-garden a thing of large masses of colour only.
The guiding aim in this book has been the selection of really suitable subjects, and the rejection of many that have been recommended and tried for this purpose. This point is more important than at first sight would appear, for in most of the literature hitherto devoted to the subject plants entirely unsuitable are named. Thus we find such things as Alnus glandulosa aurea and Ulmus campestris aurea (a form of the common elm) enumerated among subtropical plants by one author. Manifestly if these are admissible almost every species of plant is equally so. These belong to a class of variegated hardy subjects that have been in our gardens for ages, and have nothing whatever to do with subtropical gardening.