56 PINES 



evidently held good in the darker ages of a century 

 ago, and an opinion that was endorsed and quoted, 

 more or less as an eternal truth, by Uvedale Price, 

 an acknowledged authority on the subject of landscape 

 gardening in his day, some thirty or forty years after. 

 " De gustibus non est disputandum " (" there is no 

 disputing about tastes "), but the idea of the Scots 

 Pine as a blot upon the landscape would find no 

 acceptance in present-day tastes. 



This maybe, is how, three or four generations ago, 

 some talked in their haste and saw with unprophetic 

 eye the career to be of a tree that has ever since 

 never failed to be anything but a joy and delight in 

 life to the scenery lovers of the generations that 

 succeeded them. We have recorded these old-spoken 

 opinions, not because w^e deem them to be reflective 

 of the spirit even of that age, but only because they 

 happened to be the didactic utterances of a fashionable 

 few who in their day were looked up to as a '* light 

 in the path and a lantern unto the feet " of the 

 planting world. 



What we say to-day, and are convinced that the 

 vox populi would re-echo the sentiment, that as 

 the sun never ceases to gladden the heart of man 

 because it is the same old superannuated sun that 

 has gladdened it for thousands of years, so sure \s 

 it that our enduring old ally of landscape effect, the 

 Scots Pine, despite the antiquity of its reign among 

 us, will never fail to gladden, for centuries to come, 

 the hearts of future generations, even as it has 

 rejoiced ours ; and we feel sure that our wish, 

 strengthened in belief by the hopeful words of a 

 modern poet (E. M. Mills, published in Country Life, 

 and quoted below), will be fulfilled, and that even 

 if man neglect his duty of replanting them, Nature 

 will step in and perform the task, and future genera- 

 tions witness what we have seen : 



