86 STREET PLANTING 



The planting of streets has become stereotyped not only in the 

 material but in the system. The chief difficulties are due to the narrow- 

 ness of our streets. If Parliament should ever concern itself effectually 

 with town-planning, the streets of the future will no doubt be wider, and 

 some provision either at .the side or in the middle should be made for 

 tree-planting. That would make the task of the street planter easier in 

 many ways. The planting of streets down the centre can, of course, only 

 be carried out in the broad arterial thoroughfares of 'great cities. A 

 famous example of this style is the Unter den Linden in Berlin. Here 

 the limes are planted in an avenue up the centre of the roadway, and 

 beneath them pedestrians may stroll, the wheeled traffic passing along the 

 sides. I recently saw a very interesting piece of street planting in 

 Rochester in the State of New York. The centre of the street is planted 

 with magnolias of the Yulan and Soulangeana types. These are now 

 fine trees, and their flowering in spring is one of the notable annual 

 events of the city. But for such effects as these the first essential, of 

 course, is sufficient width a greater width probably than will ever be 

 accorded to all but the arteries of great cities. Most streets will always 

 have to be planted at the sides. 



My contention is that the trees now generally planted in streets are 

 naturally too big, and that their restriction to the needful limits involves 

 and inevitably involves a system of pruning which makes them eyesores 

 rather than objects of beauty through the long months they are without 

 foliage. Yet, as every forest lover knows, the leafless tree has a charm, 

 more subtle perhaps, but in its season as satisfying as that of the lush 

 growth of June. The plane and horse-chestnut are admirable where they 

 have room, as in town squares, to assume something like their normal 

 dimensions, and the former will probably always be the chief stand-by for 

 the planter in the central depths of large cities. The following notes are 

 intended to apply to the average streets of the outer London suburbs and 

 provincial towns. 



Jersey Elm. In the first place I would call attention to trees of 

 a naturally pyramidal habit. It is essential in nine-tenths of the street 

 planting, as we have to deal with it to-day, that the trees should maintain 

 a tapering form. The middle of the street must be open to the sky, and 

 the house windows must not be obscured. Therefore one great gain 

 would be secured by planting trees whose shape conformed to these 

 requirements with little or na pruning. In Kew are grown several 

 examples of what is commonly known as Wheatley's or the Jersey 

 elm Ulmus stricta var. Wheatleyi. Some of them I have known for 

 thirty years, and although during that time they have never been 

 subjected to the least pruning, they are still within the dimensions 

 suitable to streets of average size in the suburbs of London. How 



