THE BLUE RIBBON SEVEN 85 



enemies, and drives its roots into the most unpromising soil, seeming 

 at times almost to draw sustenance from the very rock, often shar- 

 ing honors with the cedar in being a cleft-in-the-rock tree. Maples 

 edged the arboretum, lined the drives and diversified the lawns in 

 Hillcrest Manor. 



The Blue Ribbon Seven. 



Among other beautiful trees on our lawns were seven that halted 

 the most uninterested and careless passer-by, and forced his admiration, 

 one, the Cedrus deodora, whose rare, blue, moss-like foliage attracted 

 instant attention. This was partially screened by a mixed group of 

 Weymouth and red pines supplemented in winter with cedar boughs 

 thrust into the ground, and built upward into a protecting bower 

 shielding it from the death-dealing winter sun and biting wind. Near 

 it was a Nordman's fir, the silver lining of whose leaves glisten in 

 sunlight and moonlight, flanked on either side by Koster's Colorado 

 spruce, as blue as bluest steel, while one hundred feet from any other 

 tree grew a glorious, kingly copper beech, and directly across the 

 lawn a magnificent specimen of one of the most beautiful trees 

 grown, the fern-leaf beech. A golden oak glowed sunshine on the 

 copper beech. Our seventh was the queenly, cut-leaf birch, whose 

 silvery branches peeped through a tracery of delicate green leaves. 

 A passing glance at this made one nature's debtor.* 



The above seven trees, with one exception, held the blue ribbon 

 against all other aspirants, though it seems invidious to restrict one's 

 selection to a paltry seven, when forest and nursery fairly teem with 

 specimens clamoring for recognition. 



The Elm. 



Towering above the blue ribboners and in a sense outrivaling 

 their skin-deep beauty, was the king of trees, the elm, the pride of 

 our forbears. For nearly fifty years two of these had looked down 

 on the farm house roof, and with o'erclasped branches seemed to 

 breathe companionship, protection and even benediction. It was 

 fully twenty feet to the first dividing limb crotch, so that sunlight 

 and air brightened and cooled the dwelling in summer and in winter 

 the gracefully swaying network of limbs and branches gave life to 

 a dead landscape.f 



The dwarf horse chestnut, the delicate leaved Sophora japonica, 

 the tremulous silver and in contrast the golden poplar; the sturdy 

 white oak whose outstretched arms sheltered our biggest herd of 

 cattle, the buckeye and the xanthocera, cork and Camperdown elms, 

 the rarely beautiful Cedrus Atlantica glauca, the Katsura tree, and 

 in a low bit of ground the rosemary and Kilmarnock willows, as 



*A taxodium diestichum fought hard for a niche in our arboreal hall of fame but was 

 finally barred as to be at its best it requires the artificial aid of severe ! pruning. 



fLightning and tornado, both dire enemies of tree life, were the undoing of our farm 

 house elms. 



