Trees 137 



for hedges and screens around the drying ground and service 

 departments. Everywhere they are the main stay, the basis for 

 content. 



But trees, like people, have their good and bad points, and 

 one cannot be too discriminating when it comes to choosing either 

 for near neighbours. In those melancholy Puritanic days when 

 cheerfulness was deemed akin to sin, there was a certain fitness in 

 planting sombre evergreens in the dooryard where they shut out 

 from the house the weak sunshine of a New England winter. 

 For this position the Norway spruce, among the first trees imported, 

 was usually chosen. It is good-looking only in its youth. Pres- 

 ently its lower limbs begin to die off, it becomes thin, ragged, 

 unhappy, depressing, and in this condition it is undoubtedly 

 responsible for much of whatever prejudice against evergreens 

 exists. The vigorous white spruce, on the other hand, forms a 

 broad-based, conical tree, densely clothed with cheerful bluish- 

 green, short, sharp needles from its tapering tip to where its spread- 

 ing branches sweep the ground. So hardy is it that in mass 

 planting it may be used as a bulwark against storms, even along 

 the sea coast. One might think that a spruce which is hardy in 

 one place might be equally so in another. Not so. The Douglas 

 spruce, of softer texture and more graceful outline than the white 

 spruce, making it more desirable for a lawn specimen, was killed 

 to the snow line when imported from France after having lived 

 through six moderate winters; but the same species, brought 

 from the higher altitudes of Colorado, never lost a leaf in the severe 

 winters of 1903-4. It is important to know the source of the 

 stock you buy. The glaucous silvery sheen of the Colorado blue 

 spruce, that sprang so suddenly into public favour, looks as if the 

 trees were covered with hoar frost when the exquisite new growth 



