440 LANDSCAPE GAEDElflNG. 



of vitality in their lower branches, as low as there was 

 young wood enough to cany on the circulation. Many 

 trees seventy feet in height, we thus reduced to thirty 

 and forty. This formed a thicket of background from 

 which we took, year by year, the weakest and most 

 misshapen ; so that a mass, composed, eighteen years ago, 

 of fifty or sixty trees, seventy or seventy-five feet high, 

 is now reduced to twenty or thirty trees only forty 

 feet high, but denser, and covering much more space 

 than double the number of original trees. Where 

 necessary to obtain certain extended views, we cut boldly 

 and irregularly through the mass, producing, after some 

 years growth, the effect as represented in Fig. 88, 

 entitled, "View from Library Window." Where we 

 accomplished two distinct landscapes — the one includ- 

 ing a charmingly wooded point called " Presqu-ile^" 

 the residence of Mrs. Denning, with a distant view of 

 Idlewild, the residence of If. P. Willis, across the 

 river ; and the other a portion of PoUapells' island — ■- 

 with a fine effect of the Dunderberg or Storm King, 

 as background. 



But, in process of time, finding that from the irregular 

 shape of the house — a view of the river side of which 

 appears as frontispiece to this Supplement — we could, by 

 careful planting against the masses forming the bound- 

 aries to the view referred to (Fig. 88), not only produce 

 more agreeable and ornamental effects from the win- 

 dows, biit confine to each window one distinct and 

 separate view, which should be seen from that one 

 window and that alone — ^while it had also the effect of 

 lengthening and extending the vistas, making, as it 

 were, a series of cabinet pictures — we advanced an 

 irregular plantation of the most ornamental trees in 

 front of these two masses, completely masking them; 

 and while very much extending the view by an apparent 

 and, indeed, an actual elongation, it also substituted from 

 the windows an ornamental grouping between the house 



