218 



THE VILLA GARDEXEK. 



depth, if" the plants are so close together as to draw one another up, and leave 

 the stems without side branches, will be everywhere seen through. Any one 

 may have a proof of this in the strips of plantations along road-sides, made to 

 shut out the public road from gentlemen's parks or pleasiu'e-grounds. At the 

 distance at which the house is placed, the road is concealed from its windows 

 by the heads of the trees ; but the spectator riding along the road sees 

 through between their stems without any difficulty. The immense masses of 

 wood in Kensington Gardens being without undergrowth, and never having 

 been thinned, are seen through in every direction, though some of them are 

 a thousand feet in depth ; and thus (now tbat the old yew hedges planted by 

 London and Wise have been cut down) there is not a single space on which 

 the imagination can rest throughout the whole of these extensive grounds. 

 A plantation which is thinly planted has this other great advantage ; viz. that, 

 while it cannot be seen through, it can be seen into : its margin, instead of 

 being a line of nuked stems, forms a succession of prominences and recesses, 

 each varied more or less in form, and in light and shaae ; and thus constituting 

 a rich and varied boundary, instead of a meagre and monotonous one. There 

 is scarcely any point which we are more anxious to impress on the minds of 

 our readers, than the necessity of planting trees and shrubs thinly, and of 

 thinning out afterwards, as the trees advance in gi-owth, so as, in gi neral, to 

 keep them clothed from the ground upwards ; and always to do so when the 

 object is concealment. As, however, in spite of all that can be said on the 

 subject, many pei'sons have an insurmountable objection to the appearance of 

 a thinly-planted plantation, it may be avoided, by planting trees between 

 those which are to remain, not as nurses, but of a smaller size than the others, 

 so as to fill up the spaces irregularly, as shown in fig. 126. ; or to plant the 

 permanent trees at once in quincunx, as shown in fi(j. 127., by which means 



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