272 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



aspiring uprights against a lake or a sunny field or a 

 sunset glow of rose and gold. Here again the spaced 

 row is fatal, though for a different reason the careless 

 composition of Nature would be lost. I have in mind 

 a pine grove at the end of a large and formal garden, 

 set out at great expense many years ago and now per- 

 haps thirty feet high. The trees are spaced as rigidly as 

 line and rule could plant them, and they do not make a 

 screen, moreover, but a solid mass. Their lower branches 

 were never trimmed out to make smooth, aspiring 

 uprights, and the grove is but a poor and formal imi- 

 tation of a bit of uninteresting young forest, with 

 rhododendrons growing peakedly underneath by the 

 paths, instead of our native, hardy wood flowers. As 

 this garden is on a hillside (but flattened out into arti- 

 ficial terraces), with a lovely prospect of the lower 

 valley and the sunset over the blue hills beyond, the 

 opportunity for some fine and imaginative use of pines 

 was great and it has been utterly muffed. Yet this 

 estate cost its owner thousands upon thousands of 

 dollars. 



Not long ago I was passing the home of one of 

 America's leading sculptors whose garden is chiefly 

 the native hemlock forest which he permits to march 

 down the hill upon his studio, and he was hi his shirt 

 sleeves at the foot of his lawn, superintending the con- 

 struction of a ha-ha wall. He seemed chiefly con- 

 cerned with the line on which the wall was to be laid, 



