86 HOW TO MAKE A COUNTRY PLACE 



well as scores of others, gave beauty and variety to lawn, meadow, 

 and hillside. 



Folly of Transplanting Forest Trees. 



Costly experiment taught that trees transplanted from the woods 

 to the open generally stand still or die, while those from the nursery 

 make rapid progress, that pruning both root and branch and several 

 transplantings do wonders for tree development, but that native trees 

 taken from a clearing often grow finely. 



The propagation of trees and shrubs from seeds was interesting, 

 but the wait too long, except in the case of pit-grown peaches, which 

 generally proved worthless sports. 



Spare the shears and you spoil the tree might well be axiomatic 

 Math the horticulturist, yet many an amateur hesitates before his 

 choicest evergreens. We changed scores of straggling branched and 

 bedraggled looking Norway spruces into pyramids of beauty from 

 sod to topmost twig by simply beheading them a foot or two for 

 several successive years, but not in freezing weather thus giving the 

 lie in part to the old saying: "The prettiest things in youth and the 

 ugliest in old age are a pig, a negro baby, and an evergreen tree." 



The Monkey Climber. 



Among our natural curiosities was a wild grapevine that in 

 some strange way had leaped without visible contact to the top of a 

 lofty fifty-year old tree. It was fitly named the monkey climber and 

 the loftiest vine in our viticetum. 



The snowy cascade of the weeping Japanese cherry, a three days' 

 wonder, ere its rarely beautiful white blossoms, grown dingy, wilt 

 and fall ; the weeping mulberry which screened an arbor seat 

 and swept toward the ground in serried columns; drooping beeches 

 and birches silhouetting almost grotesquely against the sky-line, 

 yet when well grown, rising like camels' humps, one above the other, 

 intensifying the tall, straight, dignified beauty of contrasting poplars 

 (the cottonwood) and lordly elms all these and more were to be 

 found in Hillcrest arboretum, in rare cases goaded into unusual forms 

 by the pruning knife. The birches were lined to form a sentinel 

 barrier that far outshone in beauty the time-honored picturesque 

 Lombardy poplar that unless planted with a positive end in view, 

 grows straggly and moth-eaten when it reaches lonely maturity. 



Twin Spurs of Guano and Shears. 



With guano and shears one can metamorphose everything that 

 grows. Few trees are homelier when left to themselves to struggle 

 and straggle along than Taxodium distichum (southern cypress) 

 and few more attractive than this same tree when judicious 

 pruning compels it against its habit to form a mass of closely grown, 

 pea green, feathery foliage. The long waving branches of the 

 weigela, the result of two or three years' pruning, are the acme of 



