No. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 305 



Some of the lesser forms are the dwarf June berry, the hop tree, the 

 buckeye, the sassafras, the red bud, the pink and the white dogwood, 

 several sorts of spirea, the wild bush honeysuckle, the red wax berry, 

 the wild currant, the trumpet creeper, the woodbine, the bittersweet, 

 the glaucus magnolia, and the native rhododendron. Among herba- 

 ceous forms, some are scarce enough and pretty enough, to hunt up 

 and transfer to your grounds. The orange milkweed, the cardinal 

 flower and four varieties of lady slipper, occur to me at this moment 

 as warranting the trouble. 



"To gather up these rich native materials and supplement them 

 with the best foreign forms from the nurseries; to arrange them in 

 groups with curving outlines upon the outer borders of a well kept 

 lawn is the sum and substance of landscape gardening." I told you, 

 I think, that a "formula of three postulates would embrace the 

 rules of practice. They are as follows: (A) Preserve open lawn 

 centres; (B) Plant in masses, not isolated. (C) Avoid straight 

 lines." 



These are easy rules to commit to memor}', but you will find many 

 difficulties in putting them into practice the first time. The first 

 rule seems very easy. Just refrain from planting anything except 

 around the outside. That is easy, indeed. When, however, you go 

 about it, you will suddenly find that you do not know much about 

 trees after all, and that it is much easier to plant an orchard at cer- 

 tain required distances than to plant a narrow border varying in 

 width around your dooryard. The first snag you will run up against 

 is that the trees Avhich you plant along roadsides and somewhat in 

 your 3'ard are not exactly adapted to the new style of planting. If 

 you look around in pastures and along roadsides you will see that 

 maples and oaks and elms only reach their finest development when 

 standing alone, and that they take up a good bit of room. 



You will find specimens with horizontal limbs thirty feet long and 

 the drip of such trees will fall upon more than thirteen rods, or one- 

 twelfth of an acre. Of course, you will see that a dooryard of half 

 or three-quarters of an acre cannot tolerate more than two of such 

 trees, and that they cannot be grouped. It would be like grouping 

 spread umbrellas in a show case made for milliners' goods. If you 

 were a Vanderbilt or Kockefeller, with a forty acre lawn, the case 

 would be different, of course, and you could do some magnificent 

 grouping, as is sometimes seen in pastures and along lanes. 



The great trouble with the dooryard planting of the past is that 

 the wrong material has been used and it cannot be arranged in 

 accordance with the rules of good taste. People confound shade 

 trees with ornamental trees and always unite the two, as if shade 

 was all there was in desirable planting. In ornamental planting it 

 is true as in other things, that we cannot eat our cake and keep it. 

 20—7—1900 



