DECIDUOUS TREES 99 



istic beauty of habit by the ordinary system of pruning. 

 The essential and characteristic quality of a tree or 

 shrub, by which we are accustomed to recognize its 

 special and abiding charm, is apt, in many cases, to lie 

 in the tips of the branches, and against these tips the 

 pruning knife generally wages war, dire and effective. 

 Perhaps we would not go far wrong if, instead of abol- 

 ishing the pruning knife, we limited its use to only dead 

 or diseased wood. 



Being a relative of the tulip tree, we need not be sur- 

 prised to learn that the magnolia has still worse trans- 

 planting qualities, and all that has been said about capri- 

 cious habits and slow growth during the first years of its 

 life on the lawn, especially if planted in the fall, applies 

 with much greater force to the magnolia, and goes far 

 to explain the reason why we do not see the latter 

 planted more generally. Yet nearly all the species and 

 varieties are beautiful and striking, both in flower and 

 foliage, and worth the most painstaking efforts to estab- 

 lish. Among the specially beautiful flowering kinds we 

 may mention the Japanese sweet-scented white magnolia 

 stellata, earliest blooming of its family, and also the 

 early magnolia conspicua, magnolia soulangeana, and 

 magnolia lennei ; and among the June-blooming kinds we 

 have the richly-scented, cream-colored, red-stamened 

 magnolia hypolenca, and magnolia watsonii. 



For magnificence of foliage no tree in the North can 

 surpass magnolia macrophylla, its leaves being eighteen 

 inches to two feet in length, and its great white flower 

 as much as a foot across, while its size often reaches, 

 under favorable circumstances, forty feet. All the mag- 

 nolias, it should be said, have fine foliage. 



As we turn over the pages of classic history, we find 



