Shade-Trees in Cities 



use in the streets of cities? Many- -nay, the majority of 

 shade trees - - clean and beautiful in the country - - are so 

 infested with worms and insects in towns as to be worse 

 than useless. The sycamore has failed, the linden is de- 

 voured, the elm is preyed upon by insects. \Ve have rushed 

 into the arms of the Tartar, partly out of fright, to escape 

 the armies of caterpillars and cankerworms that have taken 

 possession of better trees! 



Take refuge, friends, in the American maples. Clean, 

 sweet, cool, and umbrageous, are the maples; and, much 

 vaunted as ailanthuses and poplars are, for their lightning 

 growth, take our word for it, that it is only a good go-off 

 at the start. A maple at twenty years, or even at ten, if the 

 soil is favorable, will be much the finer and larger tree. No 

 tree transplants more readily, none adapts itself more easily 

 to the soil, than the maple. For light soils and the milder 

 parts of the Union, say the Middle and Western States, the 

 silver maple, with drooping branches, is at once the best 

 and most graceful of street trees. For the North and East, 

 the soft maple and the sugar maple.* If any one wishes to 

 know the glory and beauty of the sugar maple as a street 

 tree, let him make a pilgrimage to Stockbridge, in Massa- 

 chusetts! If he desires to study the silver maple there is no 

 better school than Burlington, New Jersey. These are two 

 towns almost wholly planted with these American trees, of 

 the sylvan adornings of which any "native" may well be 

 proud. The inhabitants neither have to abandon their front 

 rooms from the smell nor lose the use of their back yards by 

 the suckers. And whoever plants either of these three 

 maples may feel sure that he is earning the thanks instead of 

 the reproaches of posterity. 



The most beautiful and stately of all trees for an avenue 

 - and especially for an avenue street in town - - is an 

 American tree that one rarely sees planted in America t - 

 never, that we remember, in any public street. We mean 



* By the soft maple is probably meant the red maple. -- F. A. \V. 

 f Though there are grand avenues of it in the royal parks of Germany 

 raised from American seed. -- A. J. D. 



