Oenamental Trees and Sheubs. 167 



IX. 



ORNAMENTAL TREES AND SHRUBS. 



Happy is he who In a countiy life 

 Shuns more perplexing toil and jarring strife ; 

 ■Who lives upon the natal soil he loves. 

 And sits beneath his old ancestral grovea. 



I.-GEKEEAL HINTS. 



APPY indeed is he 



Who lives upon the natal soil he loves, 

 And sits beneath his old ancestral groves ; 



but this happiness is the lot of compara- 

 tively few in this conntr j. Our forefathers 

 were too deeply absorbed in the work of hewing 

 down forests to think of planting groves, or to ap- 

 preciate their beauty. They waged a war of exter- 

 mination against trees, and, so far as they went, 

 nothing but blackened stumps and unsightly skeletons 

 remained. The effects of their indiscriminate " clearing" have 

 been partially remedied in the older portions of the country 

 (for which more thanks to nature than to man) ; but even 

 there the language of our motto applies to only a few. Each 

 man's natal soil is in the hands of a stranger. What American 

 lives where his father and grandfather lived and died? We 

 have been a migratory people. It will not always be so, how- 

 ever, and if we can not, except in rare cases, "sit beneath our 

 old ancestral groves," we may yet sit beneath those of our own 

 planting — may learn to 



Love our own cotemporary trees, 



and die with the hope that our children and grandchildren may 

 enjoy their shade after we have ceased to need it. 



