316 TREES. 



the sugar maple. If any one wishes to know the glory and beauty 

 of the sugar maple as a street tree, let him make a pilgrimage to 

 Stockbridge, in Massachusetts ! If he desires to study the silver 

 maple, there is no better school than Burlington, New Jersey. 

 These are two towns almost wholly planted with these American 

 trees of the sylvan adornings of which any "native" may well be 

 proud. The inhabitants neither have to abandon their front rooms 

 from " the smell," nor lose the use of their back yards by " the 

 suckers." And whoever plants either of these three maples, may 

 feel sure that he is earning the thanks instead of the reproaches of 

 posterity. 



The most beautiful and stately of all trees for an avenue and 

 especially for an avenue street in town is an American tree that 

 one rarely sees planted in America* never, that we remember, in 

 any public street. We mean the tulip-tree, or liriodendron. What 

 can be more beautiful than its trunk finely proportioned, and 

 smooth as a Grecian column ? What more artistic than its leaf 

 cut like an arabesque in a Moorish palace ? What more clean and 

 lustrous than its tufts of foliage dark-green, and rich as deepest 

 emerald ? What more lily-like and specious than its blossoms 

 golden and bronze^haded ? and what fairer and more queenly than 

 its whole figure stately and regal as that of Zenobia ? For a park 

 tree, to spread on every side, it is unrivalled, growing a hundred and 

 thirty feet high, and spreading into the finest symmetry of outline.f 

 For a street tree, its columnar stem, beautiful either with or without 

 branches with a low head or a high head foliage over the second 

 story or under it is precisely what is most needed. A very spread- 

 ing tree, like the elm, is always somewhat out of place in town, be- 

 cause its natural habit is to extend itself laterally. A tree with the 

 habit of the tulip, lifts itself into the finest pyramids of foliage, ex- 

 actly suited to the usual width of town streets and thus embel- 

 lishes and shades, without darkening and incumbering them. Be- 



* Though there are grand avenues of it in the royal parks of Germany 

 raised from American seed. 



f At Wakefield, the fine country-seat of the Fisher family, near Phila- 

 delphia, are several tulip-trees on the lawn, over one hundred feet high, 

 and three to six feet in diameter. 



