-HO EVEKQREEN TREES — THE AMERICAN HOLLY. 



heavens; and, when these are slirouded, seeming like a living smilo beaming up out 

 of the earth. No foreign, costly Box tree, with all its wide renown, can compare with 

 this simple, rustic beauty, of our plain old colony lands. Then edge your groups and 

 borders, and mingle your shrubbery with this humble native New England evergreen. 

 There, too, is the feathery Hemlock ; and the dark, dense fringe of the Black Spruce, 

 that, in cultivated grounds, equals if not excels in beauty of foliage its more distin- 

 guished and aristocratic Norwegian brother ; and the Yellow Spruce, witli its bright 

 sunshiny hue, making the darkest day look gladsome, that in rich deep soils is often 

 mistaken for the Norway. The Fir, too, despite its formal stiflness, as it sends its 

 stately spires up among the ancient Elms and Ash trees that surround the antique 

 parsonage, or that embower the hospitable mansion of the good old country gentle- 

 man, telling of the culture and refinement of other days, and the wealth and worth of 

 the good old times that have gone, is never to be wholly spurned. And, oh ! the glory 

 and the grandeur of the giant White Pines, with their great mossy trunks, rising up 

 from the brown-carpeted and solemn aisles, like pillars in a mighty cathedral — the pil- 

 lars of God's first temple — with their leaves like a myriad harp-strings tuned to wor- 

 ship, or prophesying, in the harmonious murmurs of their unending song, of their future 

 home amid the ceaseless roaring of the weaves, whose crests they shall nod over as tall 

 spiry masts, or breast as stout timbers of some gallant vessel, in years to come. Oh, 

 I")lant a grove of Pines, good friend, on yonder bare and desolate-looking ridge, or over 

 that barren, sandy hill-side, for your children and your children's children to rejoice 

 and glory in. "Were we the king of this fair land, it would be one of the earliest proc- 

 lamations of our benevolence, that evergreens should be planted, among other shade 

 trees, on all the roads and avenues of the kingdom, on the northern exposures of the 

 dwellings of the people, and on all the breezy summits of the hills, to give defence and 

 shelter, warmth and beauty to the landscape. 



But we are forgetting our friend the Holly tree, in our thought for the rest of the 

 evergreen brotherhood. Of all our beautiful native evergreens, there is none more 

 peculiar and striking in its beauty than the Hex opaca ; and I am charmed now, as 

 I gaze out through the frosty air of the bitter winter day, on the rich, dark, glossy 

 green of its broad and quaintly-cut spinose foliage among the shrubbery. Late in 

 the autumn, in our rambles in the interminable woods of the "Old Colony," — for 

 though the first settled portion of the country, it is now the most of a wilderness of 

 anv, with miles on miles of uninhabited forest, where still the liffht-footed deer has his 

 covert, — in an open pasture ground we came suddenly upon several splendid speci- 

 mens of the American Holly, each standing isolated, and glowing in the late autumnal 

 sunshine; and, truly, no sight of the kind was ever more charming to the eye of a 

 lover of beautiful nature. Though not more than six or seven feet high, and extreme- 

 ly thick-set, they were perfect in shape, and loaded with their coral fruit ; and the 

 contrast of the deep glossy foliage with the brilliant scarlet berries with which the 

 branches were so thickly studded, presented a coup (Toeil that excited our most enthu- 

 siastic admiration. In all our various excursions in the woods and fields, from child 

 hood and youtb upward, we had never met with any wild growing thing so beautiful, 



