Art Out-of-Doors 



one can point to places where the general 

 effect would be decidely poorer without it. 

 Therefore the artist is more often told, and 

 the amateur is more often tempted, to plant 

 a birch than any other conspicuous tree; and 

 as a result it spoils as often as it helps our 

 garden-pictures. It is not a weak tree in the 

 injurious sense that we give the term when 

 we use it of the weeping willow ] but it is 

 a very delicate and phant, graceful and 

 feminine tree — the lady of the woods," as 

 a poet called it long ago; and its shining 

 trunk and twinkling leaves make it very 

 restless. It is too nerveless in build and too 

 undecided in outline to look well standing 

 alone, and it is too vivacious to look well 

 against a background composed, for instance, 

 of sugar-maples or beeches. Its place is just 

 the place in which a gardener's tree, like 

 the purple beech, ought never to stand. It 

 should be planted as nearly as possible in 

 the way that Nature plants it. It belongs 

 on the edge of a mingled growth of trees 

 and shrubs forming a natural-looking wood, 

 in a rocky glen, or on a roughish slope. 

 Among the wild pines and hemlocks, tupe- 

 286 



