312 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 494. 



a flow of sap, is not healed over with a new formation of 

 wood and bark, and soon -dies. Decay thus begins, as 

 appears in Figure 3, and this decay gradually extends 

 into the interior of the trunk, as shown in Figure 4, 

 ruining the tree for any useful purpose, and so weak- 

 ening "the supporting power of the stem that a severe 

 gale will prostrate it. This decay can be prevented by cut- 

 ting off dead branches as fast a.- they appear, and by cutting 

 living branches, when it is necessary for any reason to 



remove them, close to the 

 branch. The secret of good 

 so that the wound may heal 

 growth over the cut surface. 



irunk or close to a lateral 

 pruning lies in cutting close, 

 by the formation of a new 

 No matter how large it may 



Fig. 4 . 



be necessary to make the wound, no branch stump, large 

 or small, should be left in pruning. A coating of coal-tar 

 applied to the wound as soon as made will serve to protect 

 it from moisture, and will not interfere with the formation 

 of a new layer of wood. 



" Pruning, so far as the trees are concerned, can be done 

 at any time, except in very early spring, when they are 

 gorged with sap and 'bleed' more freely than at other 

 seasons of the year. The autumn, however, is found to 

 be the best time for such work. There is more leisure 

 now than earlier in the season, while the coating of ice 

 which often, in this climate, covers the branches of trees in 

 winter, makes it difficult and dangerous to work among them. 

 "Three men at least are needed to prune a large tree 

 properly, and to manage the long, heavy ladders which 



this operation makes necessary. 

 One man stands at a little distance 

 from the tree and directs where 

 the cuts shall be made ; the second 

 man uses the saw, which must be 

 attached often to a long handle ; 

 while the third holds one end of 

 a rope fastened to a belt on the 

 man in the tree, and passed over 

 a branch above his head as a 

 precaution against a fall. Nearly 

 all our forest trees bear severe 

 pruning of this sort, and im- 

 prove under it. Decrepit Red, 

 Black, White and Swamp Oaks, Black Birches, Beeches, 

 Hickories and Elms have been pruned in this way in the 

 Arnold Arboretum, where many of the trees in the natural 

 woods were perishing from pasturage and neglect. They 

 were covered with dead branches, the foliage upon them 

 was thin and poor, and their dying tops showed that they 

 had but a short time to live. It was important to preserve 

 many of these old trees until a new growth of self- 

 sown seedlings could be brought on to replace them and 

 a covering to the forest-floor grown. A portion of these 

 old trees are pruned each year, and those which were 

 operated upon first, or six or seven years ago, show, in 

 their dense, dark-colored foliage, compact habit and vigor- 

 ous growth, how pruning can, without fresh soil and without 

 the aid of manure, put new life into feeble and dying trees. 

 "If often happens that when trees have grown together 

 thickly, as in a forest, they are destitute of lower branches. 

 When such trees are thinned, as often happens in the 

 improvement of grounds, single specimens are left with 

 long, straight stems, and without foliage except at the very 

 top. Such trees, from the point of view of ornamental 

 gardening, are ugly objects, and are, moreover, liable to 

 blow down in the first gale. 



" But there is no deciduous tree, however tall and un- 

 sightly it may be, which cannot be gradually converted 

 into a handsome, branching specimen, by the aid of a saw 

 and a pot of coal-tar " 



Miss Abrie A. Bradley, of Hingham, Massachusetts, has 

 made a gift of $20,000 to the President and Fellows of 

 Harvard College, in honor of her father, William L. Bradley, 

 the originator of the great fertilizer business which bears 

 his name. Notwithstanding the large commercial enter- 



prises in which Mr. Bradley was engaged he had an 

 absorbing interest in trees and in tree-planting, and it is this 

 phase of his life which his daughter has wisely determined 

 to exemplify in the memorial. She has provided, there- 

 fore, that the income of the memorial gift is to be expended 

 by the Director of the Arnold Arboretum at that institution 

 for the purpose of increasing by scientific investigation the 

 knowledge of trees. Previous gifts to the Arboretum have 

 been made to erect buildings or for some other immediate 

 expenditure, and this is the first endowment whose pro- 

 ceeds can be counted on in the interest of arboricultural 

 science for all time to come. The form which this memo- 

 rial has taken is quite as creditable to the public spirit and 

 wisdom of Miss Bradley as the original conception is to 

 her filial affection. 



Planting for the Future. 



ONE of the gravest difficulties with which the landscape- 

 gardener has to contend is the lack of imagination in 

 his clients. They have not the prophetic eye to see that 

 when the debris is cleared away and the time comes to pay 

 the bills, the finished work as it then appears is not the 

 realized ideal of their artist, and not what they have paid 

 fir, but only the embryo of it. These clients are always 

 well-to-do, and often wealthy. They have been accus- 

 tomed to order furniture, carriages or what not, to sign a 

 contract for building a house or a yacht, and presently the 

 furniture or yacht is turned over to them unimprovable and 

 complete. There are no new developments to hope for, 

 but there are also none to wait for. There is no suspense, 

 but there is no expectation. 



The work of the landscape-gardener is essentially dif- 

 ferent. It must be waited for, and a great part of its charm 

 to its possessor lies in the hopes he has of it. It depends 

 principally for its means and materials on trees and shrubs 

 and plants, things in their nature changeable, and attrac- 

 tive because they are changeable ; things insignificant and 

 uninteresting to the casual beholder in their beginnings, 

 but only in their beginnings available. The designer of a 

 landscape can boast that while the works of all other archi- 

 tects begin to decay from the moment of their completion, 

 his alone begin to improve. But so few besides himself 

 understand this that he has to wait through weary and 

 dreary years for general appreciation and often for the 

 appreciation of his client, whose approval is so important. 

 This approval is important not merely from the commercial 

 point of view, which makes it necessary that he who would 

 sell his goods must please his customers, but from the 

 point of view of the artist himself, who, however conscious 

 he may be of work soundly conceived and conscientiously 

 carried out, cannot but feel ill at ease under the dissatisfac- 

 tion of his employer, though he is aware that this dissatis- 

 faction is born of inexperience and impatience. 



This difficulty, which every one who creates a design 

 out-of doors meets in a greater or less degree, is due, as 

 already stated, to lack of imagination. The imagination 

 needed here is of a peculiar kind, and only the result of 

 much training and experience. It is the faculty of perceiv- 

 ing how a new-created work will appear after the lapse of 

 years, many or few. It is the faculty which enables its 

 possessor to look at a landscape as it now is and take a 

 mental photograph of it when the naked hills are clothed 

 with trees, and the valleys changed from waste or farm 

 lands to lawns or shrubberies. Any one not accustomed 

 to this kind of exercise, who will shut his eyes and try to 

 see clearly such alterations and developments of any scene, 

 natural or artificial, that may meet his eye, will find how 

 difficult is such a mental process. And it is not to be won- 

 dered at that the majority of people, even of those who are 

 enterprising enough to face the risks and anxieties of sys- 

 tematic landscape gardening, should be, in spite of them- 

 selves, disappointed with the results as they see them in their 

 beginnings. Being without the necessary practice in look- 

 ing into the future, their vision cannot be prophetic ; and 



