In its vegetation, too, Central Park has a cosmopolitan tone. Much has been done to make it a sort of Jardin d’Acclimatation for the trees and shrubs indigenous to other climes. The commissioners’ efforts in this direction have had good results in varying its flora with exotics whose foliage or flowers make them pleasing to the eye as well as interesting to the botanist. They have not always been equally fortunate, however, and have been criticised for an apparent partiality to foreign trees in preference to natives of sturdier growth and better suited to the climate. It is not every European plant that will flourish here. For instance, six years ago a splendid row of English hawthorn bushes lined a long stretch of the park’s western edge between Sixtieth and Seventieth Streets, and in May bore a wealth of the white blossoms that take their name from the month. They are there no more, killed by the severity of our winters. [Illustration: AN AFTERNOON GATHERING ON THE MALL.] Asia, and especially Japan, have contributed some valuable additions to Central Park’s woods and shrubbery. The most conspicuous of these is the Rose of Sharon, whose pink and white blossoms are the park’s chief floral ornament in the latter days of summer—for it is in spring that most of the other shrubs and creepers flower. In the spring, indeed, Central Park reaches its acme of natural beauty and artificial attraction. In the spring its drives are thronged by the equipages of the Four Hundred who later in the year are scattered over two or three continents. In the spring the trees and meadows are clothed with a fresh garb of green, and the Park policeman in a new suit of gray, the cynosure of admiring nursemaids. In the spring the wistaria, the honeysuckle, the jasmine, and the guelder rose make the landscape gay with color. In the spring the dogwood, the most beautiful and characteristic of our lesser trees, sends down its falling petals in a snow white shower. In the spring the New Yorker may be pardoned if for once he feels positively poetical as he witnesses in Central Park the annual miracle of nature’s rejuvenation. [Illustration: THE BRIDGE ACROSS THE STRAIT BETWEEN THE UPPER AND LOWER LAKES.]