1 1 8 HOW TO LIVE IN THE COUNTRY 



suckles, and I have one barberry that outglorifies 

 everything in the catalogues. This business of cross- 

 breeding is very simple if you let the bees do the 

 crossing, and you only do the selecting. 



Nature, if left to herself, does not count a lawn 

 into her contrivances. A lawn implies too much of 

 the artificial for her somewhat wild notions and al- 

 ways means human folk about. The cow path and 

 the squirrel track she takes into her reckoning, but 

 no straight walks and no driveways, and certainly 

 no sheared evergreens or sheared grass plots. 



Lawns, however, we must have, and a right sort 

 of a lawn is indicative of civilization. If you have 

 a lawn between yourself and the street, at all, it 

 should be made up of trees, in a grass plot, not 

 sheared every day, but kept tidy and mowed three 

 or four times during the summer. It will need a 

 lot of good taste to create a lawn of this sort, and I 

 believe that nine out of ten make robust failures. 



Nothing in the world can be worse than a collec- 

 tion of weeping trees, or sheared evergreens, and a 

 lot of odd or peculiar trees forced to keep com- 

 panionship which they do not like. There are some 

 trees that have the fidgets so badly under these circum- 

 stances that they become diseased. On the other 

 hand, there are very strong friendships among trees. 

 The oak and the pine make good neighbors. 



The white elm likes to be alone running as 

 high up into the air as possible and then letting its 

 limbs droop gracefully down, to get as much more 



