24 LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE. 



this stage that the proprietor becomes conscious of his 

 own deficiency and seeks the aid of a landscape gardener. 

 Tree planting is the first positive step in the work of 

 redemption from the cheerless condition to which the 

 place has been reduced, and if the owner has attained a 

 conception of the possibility of a more graceful arrange- 

 ment than that of formal rows, and attempts the arrange- 

 ment of groups and irregular belts, he speedily becomes 

 aware that he is going beyond his depth, and is fain to call 

 for aid. He cannot satisfy himself in regard to their posi- 

 tions, and is utterly at a loss when he tries to imagine 

 what will be the effect when they have attained their full 

 size. Of their relative size, form and colour of foliage he 

 has probably no idea, and if he attempts to stake out the 

 ground for the planting of a group, it is probable that he 

 will set the stakes within five or six feet of each other, 

 and label them with the names of such trees as he has 

 bought of a travelling agent, who has assured him of their 

 desirable characteristics. He soon becomes sensible of a 

 perverse tendency of the stakes, in spite of every effort on 

 his part, to assume a formal character in their relative 

 positions, which is very inexplicable. His determination 

 was to stick them in as irregularly as possible, and he 

 finds on looking them over that he can see squares, and 

 triangles, and straight rows and quincunx figures contin- 

 ually repeated. And perhaps in the midst of his work he 

 happens to cast his eyes into an adjoining meadow 

 upon an elm which has been growing in undisturbed 

 beauty for a century, and the thought flashes across his 

 mind that he has been for an hour labelling stakes and 



