LAWNS AND SHRUBBERY 107 



openings, leaving only a few apple trees, grafted to 

 Pound Sweets and Northern Spys. 



There never were finer shrubberies than those that 

 were planted in the corners of the old zigzag rail 

 fences, where the wild sloes shook hands with the 

 hopple bushes and the great white-flowering elder 

 or golden-rods nestled close to wild asters, with 

 borders of tansy and boneset. In June the wild 

 strawberries widened this border and hid their big 

 clusters under burdock and mullein leaves like lit- 

 tle wild rabbits. In the West I used to envy the 

 great wide-winged wild thorns, covered with grapes 

 and making cool arbors everywhere in the middle of 

 oak forests. In Massachusetts you have seen what 

 Nature can do on the Berkshire Hills and in the 

 Greenfield valleys, while the dwarfed white pines of 

 New Hampshire seem to me to be the most beautiful 

 things in the world. 



Nature loves this way of doing beautiful things 

 everywhere. She sends her robins over into our 

 costly gardens, collecting seeds of rare shrubs and 

 sowing them until they become naturalized. So I 

 find among the hills that border my Oriskany Val- 

 ley, rare viburnums, crataegus, and lilacs, with not 

 a few Tartarian honeysuckles and other shrubs from 

 Siberia and the Cape of Good Hope. I enlarge a 

 little on this only to tell you that we have never 

 learned to do this business any better than Nature, 

 or to make shrubberies finer than we can find in the 

 wild. 



