140 The American Flower Garden 



to repeat the classic lines of pilasters and columns. He may 

 wish to make comfortable and beautiful a bleak hill-top where it is 

 advisable to place the house for the sake of a superb view, and he 

 will probably mass there the tall white pines whose far-flung, 

 horizontal branches, hung with needles, will shred the wind into 

 music like an ^Eolian harp, while subtly robbing it of its power. 

 Or he may group the Nordmann s fir, Veitch s and the white fir 

 (Abies concolor), all worthy of honourable place, knowing that a 

 variety of trees of the same genus usually gives greater satisfaction 

 than a collection of unrelated species. But he would never put 

 in an exposed, high, dry, windy situation the feathery, graceful 

 hemlocks that demand exactly opposite conditions to develop their 

 finest possibilities. For rock work and ground carpets he uses 

 prostrate junipers and dwarf pine. 



After the foundations of comfort and beauty, as it were, have 

 been laid on a place by means of evergreens, there will be bewilder 

 ing opportunities to use deciduous trees for filling in the boundary 

 belts, lining drives and paths, shading the tennis-court and beauti 

 fying the lawn. Shall large trees be bought or young nursery 

 stock ? Unfortunate indeed are the people who take possession 

 of a new home without a few well-grown trees upon it. The des 

 perate hurry, the nervous restlessness of the times in which we 

 live give little encouragement to planting for posterity; therefore 

 we have devised big tree movers to shift specimens to our grounds 

 from anywhere within hauling distance. This is work for experts 

 only, who must be employed at considerable expense and at no 

 little risk. Perhaps the gambling element that is involved in such 

 an enterprise only adds to its fascination. So great is the shock 

 of root-pruning and adjusting itself to a new environment that my 

 fine large pin oak, after struggling against the odds and living in a 



