XVT. FARM LANDSCAPES 



"7 do not own an inch of land — 



But all I see is mine — 

 The orchard and the mowing-fields. 



The lawns and gardens fine. 

 The winds my tax collectors are, 



They bring me tithes divine." 



— Lucy Larcom (A Strip of Blue). 



Agriculture is the one great branch of human industry that 

 does not necessarily spoil the face of nature. It does not 

 ' leave the land covered with slash, or heaped with culm, or 

 smeared with sludge, or buried in smoke. It alters and 

 rearranges, but it keeps the world green and beautiful. It 

 changes wild pastures into tame ones, and substitutes 

 orchards for woodlands. Its crops and its herds are good to 

 look upon. The beautiful plant or animal is the one that is 

 well grown ; and farm plants and animals must be well grown 

 to be profitable ; otherwise there is no good farming. Nature 

 nourishes impartially wild and tame, and crowns them 

 equally with her opulent graces of form and color. The 

 farmer has at hand all the materials that nature uses to make 

 on the earth an Eden. 



Fortunately, there are some features of the beauty of the 

 country that may not be misused. The blue sky overhead, 

 and the incomparable beauty of the clouds, are out of reach 

 and cannot be marred. Hills and vales, also, and lakes and 

 streams, and uplands and lowlands, have all been shaped by 

 the titanic forces of nature, and are beyond man's puny 

 power to change. These are the major features of the land- 

 scape. It is only the minor features that are, to any appre- 

 ciable extent, within our control: mainly, the living things 

 that are the finishings and furnishings of one's immediate 

 environment. These, however, always fill the foreground, 



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