LANDSCAPE LINES AND GARDENING 271 



specimens, creates restlessness and is quite at variance 

 with the peace of a long horizontal of lawn and path, 

 or a flat, unbroken surface. But it has also seemed to me 

 that our gardens are somewhat over-given to the horizon- 

 tal, that they are too often ironed out into a peaceful, 

 flat enclosure* and little effort is made to catch from Na- 

 ture some of her loveliest landscape moods and overtones. 



The Lombardy poplar, for instance, is a columnar 

 tree, and eminently adapted to carry the eye straight 

 up, to evoke aspiration like a spire. But to plant such 

 trees in groups, or in rows, is to thr.ow away this effect. 

 That is like building a whole street of churches, each 

 spire "killing" its neighbour. In his book, "What 

 England Can Teach Us About Gardening," Wilhelm 

 Miller prints a picture of "the proper use" of this tree, 

 in Kew Gardens, by the lake shore. Here a single 

 specimen rises out of the lower foliage, as Ruskin said a 

 cathedral spire should rise, "dreaming over the purple 

 crowd of humble roofs." Even in the photograph, it 

 strikes the note of aspiration. In some of the old 

 Italian gardens a similar note is struck with columnar 

 evergreens certain of our cedars or arbor vitses strike 

 it with unpremeditated stateliness on a rocky hillside. 

 But the trees cannot be grouped, nor planted in rows. 

 They must be set with a sparing hand, and in distinct 

 relation to lower masses. 



Again, how few gardens one ever sees which employ 

 pines as Nature employs them, to throw a screen of 



