282 IN BERKSHIRE FIELDS 



plantings which fall wonderfully into the larger 

 landscape rhythms. Such effects, indeed, have 

 more than once ruined my concentration on the 

 brassy shot that I needed to get my ball across the 

 swales of the golf club. We have been employing 

 elms as shade trees for more than two centuries, 

 over village streets and over our dwellings, and the 

 main street of Stockbridge and the famous Seminary- 

 Walk on Andover Hill are eloquent witnesses of our 

 good sense in the matter. But the elm can be much 

 more than a shade tree, especially if it belongs to 

 the round-headed, drooping-branched type. Rising 

 stately out of clustered, lowlier foliage, with shrub- 

 bery massed at the edge of the clump, its great 

 green domed crown falls superbly, on a summer 

 day, into the rhythm of a far-off mountain seen 

 beneath its branches and the lofty, puffy domes of 

 white cumuli seen in the blue above. There can be 

 no more splendid side wall to a vista. To plant 

 elms only in open, formal rows, or to leave single 

 elms as isolated, "specimen" trees, rising abruptly 

 out of a lawn instead if forming the dome to a wall 

 of greenery, has been a sad waste of landscape 

 material. 



The early settlers of our hill country planted sugar- 

 maples before their doors, and in rows along the 

 road — which, by the way, their descendants have 

 tapped till the old trees died, and then cut down, 

 without the gumption to plant more. The sugar- 

 maple is a noble tree, in winter dissolving in a great 

 fountain spray of gray twiggery, in summer a dense 

 crown of leafage shedding cool, dappled shade, in 

 autumn a blaze of cheerful gold. The old, lean-to 



