362 Landscape Gardening 



countrymen by giving fifty thousand dollars to endow a 

 professorship in a college; let the public spirited man of 

 the more humble village in the interior also establish his 

 claim to public gratitude by planting fifty trees annually 

 along its public streets in quarters where there is the least 

 ability or the least taste to be awakened in this way, or 

 where the poverty of the houses most needs something to 

 hide them, and give an aspect of shelter and beauty. Hun- 

 dreds of public meetings are called, on subjects not half so 

 important to the welfare of the place as this, whose object 

 would be to direct the attention of all the householders to 

 the nakedness of their estates, in the eyes of those who most 

 love our country, and would see her rural towns and village 

 homes made as attractive and pleasant as they are free and 

 prosperous. 



We pointed out in a former article the principle that 

 should guide those who are about to select trees for streets 

 of rural towns - - that of choosing that tree which the soil 

 of the place will bring to the highest perfection. There are 

 two trees, however, which are so eminently adapted to this 

 purpose in the Northern States, that they may be univer- 

 sally employed. These are the American weeping elm and 

 the silver maple. They have, to recommend them, in the 

 first place, great rapidity of growth; in the second place, 

 the graceful forms which they assume; in the third place, 

 abundance of fine foliage; and lastly, the capacity of adapt- 

 ing themselves to almost every soil where trees will thrive 

 at all.* 



These two trees have broad and spreading heads, fit for 

 wide streets and avenues. That fine tree, the Dutch elm,f 

 of exceedingly rapid growth and thick dark green foliage, 

 makes a narrower and more upright head than our native 

 sort, and, as well as the sugar maple, may be planted in 



* The weeping elm has not fulfilled Mr. Downing's expectations; the 

 silver maple has more than done so. It is now planted by hundreds of 

 thousands along the streets of middle western cities and towns. -- F. A. W. 



f The Dutch elm has almost disappeared from American nurseries 

 and from American landscape practice, but it is still a good sort of tree. 

 F. A. W. 



