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 pliant, 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- 
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