April i, 1891.] 



Garden and Forest. 



147 



along the way we have come, at all events the story ought to 

 show what can be done with moderate expense, by the aid of 

 such excellent publications as are now within reach of every 

 one, and how, by loving labor, the old may be made to add 

 charm and dignity to the new, while the new lends purpose 

 and meaning to the old. What has given so much delight in 

 doing, must, it seems to me, give pleasure when told, and it 

 is in this hope that I venture to detail our very simple experi- 

 ence. 



I. — THE OLD PLACE. 



In the very heart of old New England towns there may 

 often be seen some dilapidated house falling into ruins, 

 surrounded by half-dead fruit-trees and straggling shrubs, 

 while an adjacent garden, once productive and blooming, 

 runs to waste beside it. Its gates are off the hinges, the 

 fences falling to pieces, the hedges untrimmed, the flower- 

 beds smothered in weeds, coarse burdocks and rampant wild 

 vines encumber the ground and run over into the highway, 

 the trim paths have disappeared, the out-houses are toppling 

 over ; forlornness and abandonment speak in every line of the 

 decaying house, the former gentility of which renders its de- 

 cline still more melancholy. 



It was such a dreary old place as this which attracted our 

 attention when we first came to settle in Massachusetts. Why 

 such a desirable spot should have fallen into disrepute was 

 always a surprise, for the situation in itself was excellent, the 

 estate running for nine hundred feet along the main street of 

 the town, and lying about half-way between the two villages 

 known in popular parlance as The Plain, and Broad Bridge, so 

 that it was only a quarter of a mile from the post-office of one, 

 while the railway station of the other was within a ten min- 

 utes' moderate walk for a man. Moreover, it commanded 

 one of the loveliest inland views possible, and had an 

 unusual variety of surface to make it interesting, as well as a 

 fertile soil for grass and garden. 



The view was what particularly appealed to us, for it com- 

 prised a charming stretch of salt meadow with a blue stream 

 winding through it like a ribbon, skirted by low, heavily 

 wooded hills, with a distant glimpse of houses overtopped by 

 the masts of the shipping in the harbor. From the higher 

 levels of the farm one could catch a glimpse, when the leaves 

 were off the trees, of a strip of blue sea, and Boston light 

 could plainly be seen revolving after sundown, while of a still 

 evening the monotonous roll of the waves upon the beach 

 could be clearly heard. 



The old house, which we vainly tried to find habitable, had 

 stood for 200 years, and must have been a fine dwelling in its 

 day ; its rooms, though low-ceiled, being spacious and numer- 

 ous, and their outlooks picturesque. It was ill-planned for 

 modern comfort, but many of its contemporaries in this an- 

 cient town are still occupied, and by a little alteration made 

 very comfortable ; still, owing to neglect and ill usage by 

 tenants, the owners having long since moved away, it was in 

 a condition of hopeless disrepair. The floors had settled, and 

 the walls with them, until, in some of the lower rooms, there 

 were gaps beside the beams of the ceiling in which rats or 

 squirrels had made their nests, so that supplies of nuts were 

 to be seen safely stored away in the holes. The window- 

 panes were broken, the shingles moss-grown and ragged, the 

 chimneys falling into ruins and the sills had rotted away. 

 Moreover, the road that wound by the door had been so raised 

 by the accretion of 200 years that the part of the place around 

 the house lay in a hollow, and, there being no one to com- 

 plain, the town dug water-ways and coolly drained the road 

 over the surface of the ground, so that after a spring freshet 

 piles of sand were to be found all over the grass, giving the 

 farm a water-logged aspect that added to its disrepute. 



From this, and from the fact that, situated as it was between 

 the two villages, it formed absolutely a part of neither of them, 

 to us an advantage rather than a drawback, but to the towns- 

 people an objection ; it resulted that when the farm was put 

 up at auction, some ten years ago, no purchaser could be 

 found at any price. Finally, convinced that the land was 

 worth more without the house than with it, the owner took it 

 down, and, to the great amusement and consternation of the 

 old farmers who despised the spot, we bought the place for a 

 moderate sum, having convinced ourselves by careful exam- 

 ination that it would at least give us an occupation for the rest 

 of our natural lives to get it into condition, and as that was 

 what one of us wanted, we were disposed to try what could 

 be made of it, and confound our critics. 



Then arose in the village a murmur of disapprobation and 

 superior wisdom, such as is apt to follow any purchase in a 

 New England country town. 



" What does the doctor want of that forlorn old hole ? Only 

 a salt-ma'sh to look at, and the road a-drainin' right into it all 

 the time. Ain't no place to put a house ; too shady and wet 

 where the old one was, and ef he goes up on the hill he'll jest 

 blow away. Used to be a good farm in the old man's time ; 

 best garden spot in town, but pretty well run out now ; and 

 the fences ! It'll take all he'll earn to keep them fences in re- 

 pair ; half a mile o' fencin' ef there's a rod." 



And so the croaking went on behind our backs, and some- 

 times to our faces, with only a word of good-will now and then 

 from people who recalled the charm of the old place when it 

 was in the hands of the family, and hoped that something of 

 it might in time be restored. 



We ourselves, left face to face with our bargain, went over 

 the land, now our own, and took heart of grace as we planned 

 our first improvements, and decided on a site for the house. 

 When we took an account of stock this is what we found : 



A curiously shaped piece of land, something like the state of 

 Maryland, omitting the eastern shore. The long front of 

 about nine hundred feet, lying upon the main street, at its 

 southern end was nearly six hundred feet in depth, but this 

 part of the place was a barren gravelly hill, which had been 

 pastured until nothing was to be found upon it but a thin, 

 wiry grass full of white weed and a growth of short briers. In 

 the autumn it was a blaze of Golden-rod. The hill sloped 

 steeply to the north and north-east, so that the side of it was 

 exposed and cold, the wind sweeping up across the meadow 

 from the sea in bleakest gusts. This we at once determined 

 was the place to plant Pines, with a view to a subsequent for- 

 est. At the foot of the hill was a fertile swale of excellent 

 grass-land, which intervened between it and a second rise of 

 land, which was the termination of another gravelly hill, 

 through which the main street had been cut, leaving upon our 

 side a small knoll, from which the ground sloped in every 

 direction, making a perfectly drained and slightly elevated spot 

 for a house, an excellent, but rather limited situation, per- 

 fectly barren of trees, and requiring much grading. 



On the north side of this knoll was another abrupt slope, and 

 then the ground swept on below the level of the highway, 

 gradually narrowing, as a back street, running obliquely, came 

 to intersect the main road at the northern extremity of the 

 place, where was an Apple-orchard of immense old trees 

 whose bending boughs swept the ground ; and in the very 

 point a wilderness of Locusts and Wild Cherries. 



The site of the old house, shaded by some fine Elms and 

 White Ashes, was too near both streets to be at all desirable, 

 though the shrubbery 'and the tangled remains of an old 

 flower-garden rendered it very attractive, but at the rear the 

 salt-marsh was in too close proximity, and about half an acre 

 bordering on the back street was so overflowed at times by 

 salt-water that it would only afford a crop of marsh-grass. 



The neighborhood of this meadow was thought to be one 

 of the drawbacks of the spot by many ; but, knowing that it 

 was perfectly wholesome, and certainly beautiful, to us it was 

 only an added advantage, so long as the gravelly knoll gave 

 us so good a foundation for our dwelling. 



Our first problem, the fences, we determined to deal with 

 by planting Willows. The barren hill-side was to be screened 

 with Pines, and our manner of procuring and setting these 

 will form the subject of my next paper. 



Hingham, Mass. Mary C. Robbins. 



Notes on North American Trees. — XXV. 

 63. Acer grandidentatum is a small tree, of the Sugar 

 Maple group, scattered in a few rather isolated- situa- 

 tions in the central mountainous region of the con- 

 tinent from western Montana, where Nuttall discov- 

 ered it many years ago, to northern Mexico and 

 western Texas. It has small, pale leaves, only two 

 or three inches across, deeply three-lobed, with mostly 

 acute or sometimes obtuse lobes. The flowers and fruit 

 are not to be distinguished from those of the Sugar 

 Maple, except that they are sometimes a little smaller, 

 and I can find no good characters by which to separate 

 this western tree from our eastern Sugar Maple, to 

 which it appears joined, botanically and geographically, 

 by a tree of the Gulf states with small obtusely lobed 

 leaves, often pale on the lower surface, and with small 

 flowers and fruit. This is the Acer saccharinum, var. 

 Floridanum, of Chapman ("Fl. S. States," 81), which is 

 found from western Florida to western Texas, where I 

 have collected it on the banks of the upper Cibolo River, 



