1 68 Home landscape 



stateliness, and in which we can form walks agreeable in 

 hot weather and useful in other ways for the creatures 

 or frequenters of woodland. 



The browsing line. In pastures this is often very ugly 

 and hard, and few people seem to have the courage to 

 get rid of it by no means a difficult matter. We should 

 always remember that trees grow in the forest as columns, 

 not bushes, and the isolation of a tree in pasture, by 

 causing it to branch all round, gives it often a shape far 

 from beautiful, and by allowing the cows to do the prun- 

 ing we do not improve matters. It is bad in another 

 way by overweighting the tree with branches, because 

 many of these lower limbs the tree itself tries to throw 

 off as they become feeble and worn out. The right thing 

 to do in many such cases is to remove the browsing line 

 by trimming up as far as the true framework of the tree, 

 which often begins 10 or more feet above the ' line J . In 

 many cases I have cut away the branches to a height of 

 15 feet, and a more free and good form has been obtained. 



Toy tray trees. An acquaintance with the Pine woods 

 of the northern world should save us from the weak way 

 of planting each tree, set out by itself as a ' specimen '. 

 Even worse is it when, instead of keeping these Pines in 

 the pinetum, they are scattered about the foreground of 

 the house, and some of the finest houses in England 

 are marred by scattering Pine-trees in the foreground. 

 The conical shape of many Pines, always ugly as com- 

 pared with the trees of our own country, is only natural 

 to them when young. Of the many questions which the 

 landscape planter has to face that of the forms and 

 grouping of trees is the most important. A knowledge 

 of them is absolutely needed in pleasure grounds, parks, 

 and woods ; not only the ordinary plantation or shrub- 



