ON WOOD AND PLANTATIONS. 83 



ing groups, as painters love to study and introduce into 

 their pictures. Sturdy and bright vines, or such as are 

 themselves picturesque in their festoons and hangings, 

 should be allowed to clamber over occasional trees in a 

 negligent manner ; and the surface and grass, in parts of 

 the scene not immediately in the neighborhood of the 

 mansion, may be kept short by the cropping of animals, or 

 allowed to grow in a more careless and loose state, like that 

 of tangled dells and natural woods. 



There will be the same open glades in picturesque as in 

 beautiful plantations ; but these openings, in the former, 

 will be bounded by groups and thickets of every form, and 

 of different degrees of intricacy, while in the latter the 

 eye will repose on softly rounded masses of foliage, or sin- 

 gle open groups of trees, with finely balanced and graceful 

 heads and branches. 



In order to know how a plantation in the Picturesque 

 mode should be treated, after it is established, we should 

 reflect a moment on what constitutes picturesqueness in 

 any tree. This will be found to consist either in a certain 

 natural roughness of bark, or wildness of form and outline, 

 or in some accidental curve of a branch of striking manner 

 of growth, or perhaps of both these conjoined. A broken 

 or crooked limb, a leaning trunk, or several stems springing 

 from the same base, are frequently peculiarities that at once 

 stamp a tree as picturesque. Hence, it is easy to see that 

 the excessive care of the cultivator of trees in the graceful 

 school to obtain the smoothest trunks, and the most sweep- 

 ing, perfect, and luxuriant heads of foliage, is quite the 

 opposite of what is the picturesque arboriculturist's ambi- 

 tion. He desires to encourage a certain wildness of growth, 

 and allows his trees to spring up occasionally in thickets 



