30 THE MANSE GARDEN. 



a great degree entire if the branches be kept entire ; 

 but this method is wholly inadmissible for the adorn- 

 ing of treeless hedges, or relieving the sterile and 

 wretched appearance of dry stone dykes an object 

 extending to nine tenths of the arable fields through- 

 out all the breadth and length of the land. 



Let younger trees be planted, in the form of pol- 

 lards, and they will do in every case clothing the 

 country, and at no considerable cost. It is objected 

 to the pollard, that it has a mean and deformed ap- 

 pearance ; but what is the patience of a bare pole for 

 one summer, compared with enduring the nakedness 

 of a country age after age ? And that the defect is 

 only temporary, I could refer to a thousand instances 

 in which the most critical eye could not discover that 

 the tree, no longer a pollard, had once suffered the 

 disgrace of decapitation. Where the young shoots 

 are thinned out, the second or third year after trans- 

 planting, and any decayed wood smoothed off, so as 

 to allow the bark to close in with the new growth, 

 no more defect will be visible than in any tree of the 

 same advancement growing where it was sown. The 

 ash and elm do best, and the oak will not fail in good 

 soil; but the beech and the plane had better not be 

 lopped, and in that case the roots must be more care- 

 fully extracted. 



But why make pollards at all, it may be asked, 

 since their appearance is at least for a time deformed ? 

 The answer is, that, having little ballast, they meet 

 the wind with less sail ; but a far stronger reason is, 

 that the future growth of the pollard is better than 

 that of a tree, of whatever size, transplanted entire as 

 to the branches, but mangled as to the roots. In 



