IRature IRotes : 
Zbc Sclborne Societ^j’s flDagasine 
No. 146. FEBRUARY, 1902. Vol. XII'I. 
SELBORNIANA. 
The Richmond View. — The general press — ignorant perhaps 
of the locality — seem scarcely to have realised that the announce- 
ment which has just been made that the Petersham Lodge 
Estate has been secured from any fear of building is of even 
greater importance, so far as the view from Richmond Terrace 
is concerned, than the — we hope assured — acquisition of Marble 
Hill itself. This new assurance we owe to the taste of Mr. Max 
Waechter. At the same time the Richmond Corporation have 
the opportunity, owing to Sir J. Whittaker Ellis’s intended 
retirement to the Isle of Wight, of acquiring Buccleuch House, 
and thus, if they choose, of extending their public gardens to 
the river’s edge and of restoring an uninterrupted riverside path 
to Kingston. 
Rural Scenery. — We have received the following letter 
from Miss Brinkley, with which, we need hardly say, we most 
heartily sympathise, although, where landowners are absentees 
who do not trouble themselves in the matter, we can see no 
remedy for what is merely want of taste on the part of their 
tenants but the laborious attempt to educate the said tenants : — 
“ As a Selbornian and a profound lover of Nature, I write to ask if nothing can 
be done to protect the rural scenery of England. Our village lanes are disfigured 
by the cutting of the boughs of the trees in the hedges, it is said by order of the 
District Council. But by far greater enemies to scenery (at least in the Somerset- 
shire village in which I live) are the farmers who cut and mutilate the trees all 
over the fields. The fact that the District Council once a year orders them to trim 
up all the trees by the road sides would seem to give them a free hand to spoil all 
the trees on their farms in a similar way ; and not only that, but they depute this 
business to their farm man or carter, an ignorant villager who cuts away at the 
trees in a ruthless manner. I was the means of saving the limbs of a fine old 
elm in view of my house. I spoke to the man who was about to cut them. He 
said his master had gone to market and had left him to do it. I asked him to 
