VARIETY IN TREES 103 



wholesome — experiences was concerned with trees. It was on 

 a train with the distinguished Director of the Arnold Arboretum. 

 He said, "Can you name every tree you see from this window, 

 by its structure, its outline?" "No," I replied. "Why not? 

 You should be able to," was his answer. Those words will never 

 leave me; nor will these others, which, if the reader will forgive 

 a digression, I will here recall. Long ago, while playing a sonata 

 and carelessly including a note not on the page, the instructor 

 took my hands from the keys, laid them in my lap, and, looking 

 me straight in the eye, said, "Never add to Beethoven!" 



The two aspects of trees that the tree-illiterate like myself 

 may enjoy in his ignorance are form and color. What is more 

 interesting than the outline of a tree, a tree where space, sun 

 and air have had their way with it: the vase- or fan-shaped elm, 

 the dome-like maple, the triangular or pyramidal spruce, the 

 round or cushion-like hawthorn, the slender arborvitse, the 

 red cedar cutting the air like a sword, the apple with its low- 

 spreading habit — that intimate, most friendly tree, the apple! 

 And these are only the Eastern American trees, the commonest. 

 Take the eucalyptus, a tree for poet and painter; the live oak, 

 reminiscent of Italian gardens ; the great spruces of the western 

 mountains; the madrona of the Pacific shore with its brilliant 

 bark — the list is almost endless. It is not only form however; 

 these trees differ each from each in color of mass, in color of 

 foliage, and in color of flowers too, as the stars from each other 

 in glory. There are the blue-greens of spruce and eucalj'ptus, 

 the black-greens of live oak cedar, and fir, the ivy-greens of 

 Norway maples and of certain oaks, the yellow-greens of soft 

 maples, the gray-greens of the poplar tribe. 



As I write, I think of our cruelty to trees — all again through 

 ignorance. The unhappy spruces, "trimmed up," the street 

 maples, "headed in" when planted; the beautiful native haw- 



