142 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



of Middle or Northern Europe, — many more. Many of these 

 are amono; the most beautiful and valuable trees in the world. 

 A man can do nothing for the improvement of his home so 

 cheaply as to plant around his house, at a proper distance, 

 the best and finest trees. What are the best? Every person 

 must be the judge of that. I think, taking all things into 

 consideration, the sugar-maple is the finest and the most valu- 

 able tree that a man can plant on his domain. The sugar- 

 maple is, perhaps, the most beautiful tree while it is young, 

 and it e^rows more and more beautiful with age. It grows to 



O 



a magnificent height, and it has the advantage of being very 

 unlike all others. I pass very often, in the summer, over a 

 road, by the side of which there is a row of fifty or sixty 

 sugar-maples. They are changing every day. In the autumn 

 they assume the richest colors ; and, what is remarkable, — 

 what is not true of any other tree that I know of, — every indi- 

 vidual tree has its own colors. You cannot find two out of 

 the sixty on that road, quite alike. All of them have patches 

 of the same colors, a few of the richest colors, but no two 

 are alike. Now, variety is one of the elements of beauty. 

 If you want the greatest possible variety of beauty in your 

 trees, plant rock-maples. Not about your house ; plant them 

 along the road ; plant them along avenues ; anywhere. They 

 will grow larger and grander and more beautiful for forty 

 years ; and, before that time, they will begin to be pecuniarily 

 valuable, so that every tree will yield from three or four 

 gallons to a barrel of sugar-making juice. They will be a 

 perpetual benefit, and of perpetual value. 



As to the trees that you plant near your house to make it 

 more healthy and pleasant, I think that one of the very best 

 is the beech. And the reason is, that it is a perfectly clean 

 tree. It has a clean stem, none is finer, a beautiful bark, 

 and no bushes flourish under it ; it keeps everything off. It 

 is clean, exquisitel^'^ clean. I saw in England, near the house 

 of a friend, three noble beeches, and the European beech is 

 so much like ours, that while they are young, they are not 

 easily distinguished. It is only by examining their leaves 

 closely that one can see the difference ; and I told him that they 

 made his house to me more pleasant than any other house I 

 had seen. And it was so, and they constantly felt it to be so. 



