Esthetic Forestry 189 
While the well-meaning but poorly-informed tree-loving 
public improperly resents the interference with Nature, 
advocating the extreme let-alone policy, the park manager 
may fall into the other extreme of trying to assist Nature 
too much. The mistake which otherwise good park man- 
agers are apt to make is that they transfer their conceptions 
which fit the tree on the lawn to the tree in the forest. The 
tree on the lawn, single or in groups, we admire for its sym- 
metrical individual form, which is secured by preventing 
interference on the part of neighbors. In the forest it is 
not the individual, but the ensemble, that pleases. Thus 
the asymmetry of the whole is to be considered rather than 
the symmetrical development of the individual. Here the 
trees should be rather crowded so as to assume the type of 
the real forest-grown tree. Pruning to form would here be 
out of place and the orderliness of the formal park a hope- 
less mistake. 
Nevertheless, improvement and assistance to Nature is 
by no means excluded, but here we must let Nature lead 
and only follow her up to correct her esthetic errors; while 
in the formal park the landscape gardener must be positive, 
here his art must be subordinate, confined almost entirely 
to negative measures. 
Each forest in its virgin condition exhibits a different 
type according to its composition, and so each woodland 
park may differ and yet fulfil its function; in other words, 
no hard and fast rules as to its appearance can be laid down. 
If a bit of hemlock forest has luckily become part of the 
park, or a growth of pine or spruce, it would be poor taste 
to disturb their “purity”? by introducing admixtures or 
undergrowth. In the very monotony of the dense conifer 
forest, with its tall clean symmetrical shafts of even develop- 
ment and its somber shade excluding all undergrowth lies 
