HOW TO MAKE A COUNTEY PLACE. 447 



instituted, will now always appear to a disadvantage in 

 connection with the forest, besides the injury to their 

 progress from the roots and drip of their hungiy and 

 uncouth companions. 



There is, to be sure a certain class or condition of 

 wood which chance or design has from year to year 

 thinned out, and cattle cleared of undergrowth, re- 

 sembling the oak openings of the West, which becomes 

 after a while a sort of natural park, most desirable for 

 country residences, but the thick, tangled, inextricable 

 wood which will not readily admit any amelioration, 

 but always returns for your attempted improvement, 

 sickly and dying trees, pointing at you from every direc- 

 tion their weird and skeleton limbs, as if in derision 

 and mockery at your efforts, had better be left alone in 

 its wildness, or no attempts made to reform it. 



The proper way, we have always thought, to make a 

 country place, where there are no trees already existing, 

 is, as we have already described as in Mr. Hunnewell's 

 case, to dig an irregular border all round the boundary, 

 or at least on those sides exposed to public roads or dis- 

 agreeable objects, and to plant this with a judicious 

 mixture of deciduous and evergreen trees of two or 

 three feet high, either imported from Europe for a few 

 dollars the hundred, or purchased from our own nurseries 

 at wholesale prices. 



We do not mean by this to be understood as recom- 

 mending one of those formal belts so much employed 

 in the time of Brown, but a picturesque boundary, with 

 bays and recesses, and projecting curves, occasionally 

 employing the denser and more umbrageous trees where 

 distant and unsightly objects are to be excluded ; and 

 again the lowest growing shrubs to admit the landscape 

 beyond the boundaries when it is desirable to do so. 

 This border may, the first few years, be employed 

 as a nursery for the purpose of receiving all the trees, 

 shrubs and plants required for the future and entire 



