56 PINES 
evidently held good in the darker ages of a century 
ago, and an opinion that was endorsed and quoted, 
more or less as an eternal truth, by Uvedale Price, 
an acknowledged authority on the subject of landscape 
gardening in his day, some thirty or forty years after. 
“ De gustibus non est disputandum”’ (‘‘ there is no 
disputing about tastes ”’), but the idea of the Scots 
Pine as a blot upon the landscape would find no 
acceptance in present-day tastes. ‘ 
This maybe, i is how, three or four generations ago, 
some talked in their haste and saw with unprophetic 
eye the career to be of a tree that has ever since 
never failed to be anything but a joy and delight in 
life to the scenery lovers of the generations that 
succeeded them. We have recorded these old-spoken 
opinions, not because we deem them to be reflective 
of the spirit even of that age, but only because they. 
happened to be the didactic utterances of a fashionable 
few who in their day were looked up to as a “ light 
in the path and a lantern unto the feet’ of the 
planting world. 
What we say to-day, and are convinced that the 
vox popult would re-echo the sentiment, that as 
the sun never ceases to gladden the heart of man 
because it is the same old superannuated sun that 
has gladdened it for thousands of years, so sure is 
it that our enduring old ally of landscape effect, the 
Scots Pine, despite the antiquity of its reign among 
us, will never fail to gladden, for centuries to come, 
the hearts of future generations, even as it has 
rejoiced ours; and we feel sure that our wish, 
strengthened in belief by the hopeful words of a 
modern poet (E. M. Mills, published in Country Life, 
and quoted below), will be fulfilled, and that even 
if man neglect his duty of replanting them, Nature 
will step in and perform the task, and future genera- 
tions witness what we have seen : 
