THE BROAD REACH OF A PATRIARCHAL SYCAMORE TREE IS ALL-EMBRACING 
While the American Plane-tree suffers from a fungous disease which does not attack the European variety, magnificent 
specimens are not infrequent near old dwellings, for the beauty and majesty of the tree were appreciated by the earliest settlers 
WALKS AND 
WHEREIN IS REFLECTIVE 
TALKS AT BREEZE HILL 
, CRITICAL, PHILOSOPHICAL AND FRIENDLY COMMENT 
j. Horace McFarland 
Of Some Evergreens That Weathered Our Worst Winter and Others That 
Did Not, Thereby Offering a Mystery to Pique Interest and Discussion 
HE Editor tells me that I may talk to garden friends in 
this column, from time to time, of plant experiences. 
To start right, let me explain that Breeze Hill gardens 
are those of a busy man who loves the things that grow 
on God’s earth, who finds his garden work as recreatively effec- 
tive and absorbing as golf is to some of his acquaintances (though 
they cannot believe it!), and who has neither the guidance nor 
the hindrance of any skilled help. 
The gardens and the home they surround are really on a hill 
that is more than breezy in bitter winter weather. The two-and- 
a-third acres of the plot are very large acres, because of the 
natural divisions by the old trees and old hedges 1 found when 
I came to own this quarter-circle (I call it my piece of pie!) 
some eleven years ago. These trees — a great and grand Syca- 
more, a fine Linden, six big Horse-chestnuts, three Pines, seven 
Hemlocks, and some rather decrepit Norway Spruces, together 
with a sizable Buffum Pear, two Persimmons and a dozen small 
sour Cherry trees — suggested certain divisions, confirmed by a 
picturesque and meandering row of Arborvitaes, ten or twelve 
feet high and quite on the down grade of life. A dozen old 
Grape-vines, planted, it was said, in 1858, a vault, a well, a 
wrecked greenhouse, and an ice-house of similar value, com- 
pleted the impedimenta of 1909. 
The soil? There wasn’t much that was arable. Of shrubs, 
some old Lilacs, a dozen “old-fashioned” Roses in a shaded 
corner, and a few Deutzias and Spireas; weeds — such as might 
be expected where cultivation had been minus for five years; 
Dock and Poison Ivy, Shepherd’s Purse and Sorrel, Poke-weed 
and Plantain, Dandelions galore! 
The ideals for these gardenerless gardens developed slowly 
enough to avoid disastrous mistakes. A good friend who is a 
great landscape artist showed me the natural centre line, the 
vertical axis, through the living-room of the house and from the 
pie’s point to the middle of its curved edge, at right angles to 
the dominant Arborvitae hedge, which gave the horizontal axis. 
The centre garden was the old greenhouse location, and the 
