342 Landscape Gardening 



thereby overruns, appropriates, and reduces to beggary all 

 the soil of every open piece of ground where it is planted. 

 These are the mortifications which everybody feels sooner 

 or later who has been seduced by the luxuriant outstretched 

 welcome of its smooth round arms, and the waving and 

 beckoning of its graceful plumes, into giving it a place in 

 their home circle. For a few years, while the tree is grow- 

 ing, it has, to be sure, a fair and specious look. You feel 

 almost, as you look at its round trunk shooting up as straight 

 and almost as fast as a rocket, crowned by such a luxuriant 

 tuft of verdure, that you have got a young palm tree before 

 your door, that can whisper tales to you in the evening of 

 that "Flowery Country" from whence you have borrowed 

 it, and you swear to stand by it against all slanderous asper- 

 sions. But alas! you are greener in your experience than 

 the Tartar in his leaves. A few years pass by; the sapling 

 becomes a tree, its blossoms fill the air with something that 

 looks like curry-powder, and smells like the plague. You 

 shut down the windows to keep out the unbalmy June air 

 if you live in town, and invariably give a wide berth to the 

 heavenly avenue if you belong to the country. 



But we confess openly that our crowning objection to this 

 petted Chinaman or Tartar who has played us so falsely is 

 a patriotic objection. It is that he has drawn away our 

 attention from our own more noble native American trees 

 to waste it on this miserable pigtail of an Indiaman. What 

 should we think of the Italians, if they should forswear their 

 own orange trees and figs, pomegranates and citrons, and 

 plant their streets and gardens with the poison sumac-tree 

 of our swamps? And what must a European arboriculturist 

 think, who travels in America, delighted and astonished at 

 the beauty of our varied and exhaustless forests - - the 

 richest in the temperate zone - - to see that we neither value 

 nor plant them, but fill our lawns and avenues with the 

 cast-off nuisances of the gardens of Asia and Europe? 



And while in the vein, we would include in the same 

 category another less fashionable, but still much petted 

 foreigner, that has settled among us with a good letter of 



