66 My Little Farm 



exclusive interest in getting back, if only as care- 

 takers, instead of trying where they are, as lords 

 and masters, to transplant the good points of Eden, 

 including the trees. Operating under endless 

 uncertainty from a base at such deadly distance, 

 and declining to revise the strategy for the 

 changing needs of the campaign, they must spend 

 their power to make progress on merely guarding 

 the line of communication, necessarily missing the 

 best that could be at either end. Forward motion 

 is not easy astride of two worlds of which one is 

 despised and the other unknown. 



The trees planted by the peasants seldom 

 survive, and in so far as I have seen, nine-tenths 

 of the loss is from one simple cause : in need and 

 treatment, they see no difference between trees 

 and cabbages. When the young trees begin to 

 look sick from sinking the stem too deep in the 

 soil, they heap up more soil to that suffering stem, 

 which depends for its life on contact with the air 

 down to the crown. Next year, the tree is dead. 

 In the third or fourth year of their life with me, 

 I go among the trees, examine the young stems, 

 and remove any earth I can find fixing itself above 

 the level of the lowest bark. The conifers are 

 specially vulnerable. I can go now and pick out 

 among them trees that suffered in this way before 

 I relieved them. They responded at once to the 

 attention, and they are growing vigorously now, 

 but still smaller than their neighbours, which 

 needed no relief, showing how neglect for a year 

 or two can retard the progress for many years to 



