THE " HARD-WOODED " DEPARTMENT 3 



nised and used, and the nurseryman finds that he must not only 

 devote considerable areas to its accommodation but must so lay out 

 his grounds that he may display it to the best advantage. 



DURABILITY OF TREES 



We have already hinted that the propagation and cultivation of 

 this class of stock is slow compared with the more rapid methods 

 usual in the other glass-house department, and perhaps for that 

 reason it does not attract so many young workers. It is natural to 

 youth to be impatient, to love quick results, to hanker for change ; 

 we would be the last to find fault with it. That is why we suggested 

 that the different callings required different mentalities, for whole 

 generations of ordinary soft-wooded plants are produced, grown, 

 flourish and depart while their hardwooded companions are yet 

 struggling through their initial stages. It is in the scheme of nature 

 that durable things shall develop slowly, and while a mushroom 

 shall grow up in a single night and perish in a day, an oak, with a 

 prospective thousand years before it, shall be but a slip after five 

 years. 



When we stand in admiration before some stately and magnificent 

 conifer a Wellingtonia perhaps towering 100 feet, or a spreading 

 cedar it does not always occur to us that at one time those majestic 

 trees were mere cuttings under a light or seedlings in a pan they 

 have got so far beyond it that the thought savours almost of the 

 ludicrous. When we see the shapely and massive proportions of a 

 good purple beech, or the myriad-armed pendula of a weeping ash 

 covering nearly a rood of ground, we scarcely think of them as mere 

 slips grafted on to a bare thin stem ; yet, such were their beginnings, 

 and it is a fascinating occupation to go back and trace them along, 

 stage by stage, to their present proportions. 



And after all is said and done, if we might, for a moment, be 

 permitted to philosophize, is there not a tremendous satisfaction in 

 standing before this spreading cedar or this dense and shapely beech 

 and reflecting that in our younger days ours were the hands that 

 sowed the seed or grafted the stocks, ours the care that nursed them 

 through babyhood, producing in due time the result before us now, 

 until we look upon them in their fullest strength and beauty as " a 

 thing of beauty and a joy for ever ? " 



