12 THE REPORT OF THE [No. 19 



planted love can be oflfered than the fact that it ia almost impossible to persuade the 

 average man to part with a single one of his trees, even when the destr action of one 

 means the Setterment of the others. 



Occasionally, however, one sees a tree, even in London, that has had unlimited 

 chance to develop, and the owners of these grand trees declare them to be without price; 

 but these beautiful examples are all too few. The other extreme ia everywhere, and per- 

 haps the most flagrant case in London is in front of the OoUegiate Institute. There 

 stand three or four rows of trees, not one of which is now, or has any prospect of ever 

 being anything but an eyesore, and yet those trees are old enough and have used enough 

 nourishment from the soil and light from above to have made trees as handsome as any 

 in the city had they been given proper opportunity. They are now so far gone that it would 

 be almost impossible to make a really fine tree out of a single one of them ; and what has 

 occurred here is in process of occurring all over where from two to ten trees are planted 

 in the space which one large, well-grown tree will need in twenty-five years. 



At irregular intervals a man, c*lled by courtesy a " tree pruner," more or leas author- 

 ized by those who rule over us to butcher every inanimate object, traveh through our 

 streets and makes a bad matter still worse. 



A gentleman living near my house had last summer a very handsome cut leaved 

 birch and a good many maples growing on his front lawn. Noticing that the birch was 

 beginning to suffer from being overcrowded, I one day complimented him on the beauty 

 of his tree, and suggested that it needed more room in order to retain ita beauty. He 

 replied that it was a very nice tree, but it needed pruning, and he was getting a man who 

 understood such things to come and see to it. The beauty of this species of birch lies in 

 the long, slender, drooping branchlets, and in the handsome pyramidal shape of the tree ; 

 but this " pruner " sawed off the trunk of this tree at about eight feet from the top, sawed 

 one-third off the larger limbs, and left the tree shorn of all its beauty and with the work 

 of years destroyed. All the tree needed was to receive plenty of light and to be left 

 alone. Such examples are abundant. 



I notice lately that the tree pruner is getting in his deadly work at Springbank also. 

 Wir.hin the past year or two the birches, poplars, maples, etc , near the pump house hive 

 had from two to five feet taken off most of their branches, and from the trunk also. The 

 object of this treatment is undiscoverable. The spruces, too, in other parts of the grounds, 

 are receiving similar attention, and of all trees the spruce needs pruning least, aud bears 

 il worst. A pruned spruce is no longer a spruce, but an abortion, unlike anything in 

 nature and is fit only for the brush pile, for it will never be itself again. 



When trees are too many, cut some of them down. A tree which is too large for its 

 environment can never be made handsome by any system of pruning, and not ouly that, 

 it will spoil others which might be ornamental if its space were vacant. 



Now, a word as to the planting of shade trees. In London we suffer from a super- 

 fluity of silver maple (Acer dasycarpum). This is a quick growing tree of handsome form, 

 but there are others that are as quick growing and many that, though slow growers, are 

 more desirable and very handsome. Our streets should not all be planted with one kind 

 of tree. Monotony should be avoided. Besides, when a blighting disease or a devastat- 

 ing insect, affecting possibly only one species of tree, reaches a city pUntnd with that tree 

 only, that place is liable to have very few good trees left. Sime twenty-five years ago 

 the streets ot London had many locust trees, whose foliage and fl jwers arn booh beautiful, 

 but the locust borer caaae among them and now they are gone. The maple is a grand 

 tree, kardy and nobly beautiful, but we have many other fine trees also, and doubtless it 

 was never intended that we should confine ourselves to the use of one species only. The 

 birches, three or four species of beautiful trees, immortalized in poetry and characteristic 

 of the north ; the lofty elm, whose fame as a street tree in New England has spread over 

 the entire continent ; the fragrant basswood, the evergreen spruces and cedar, the hemlock, 

 which I sometimes think is the handsomest of all our trees, and the nut trees, chestnut, but- 

 ternut, walnut, beech and the hickories — all these and many more have beauties of their own, 

 and should be largely used, particularly the nut class, which render the parks attractive 

 to the squirrels and the birds and the children, and is it not for the children, particularly 

 those of the poorer people, for whose use the parks should mainly exist 1 I have no pati- 

 ence with the park regulations which say to the children, " Keep off the Grass." Rather 



