42 
BUILDING SITES 
Trees requiring much moisture, which grow close to streams or wet 
places, usually have their finest development when standing several 
feet above the level of the water in ground that is perfectly drained 
by the proxmiity of a watercourse^ and which at the same time affords 
the roots an opportunity to drink at will when deep enough. 
No thorough gardener, or intelligent planter, is content with 
surface or open-ditch drainage. It is always insufficient, bungling, 
and untidy. The most perfect drainage is that formed by a gravelly 
soil underlaid with coarser gravel to a considerable depth. This 
is Nature’s sub-soil drainage; and it is a well-known fact that 
soils but meagrely supplied with vegetable and mineral food for 
plants — “ poor soils ” as they are often called, when judged by 
their appearance rather than their results — will yield better annual 
returns in crops than the richest undrained lands. Where Nature 
has provided this sub-soil drainage, other drains may not be neces- 
sary ; but there are few localities where the sub-soil is so perfect 
as to render artificial drainage superfluous. Where cellars are 
found to be always dry, though not provided with drains, the 
natural drainage may be considered perfect ; but it will not do to 
infer that because one spot is dry, without drains, that another a 
hundred feet from it, on a different altitude or exposure, is equally 
favored ; though large districts of country are occasionally found 
where good natural drainage is the rule, and springy sub-soils the 
exception. The writer has observed some very suggestive phe- 
nomena illustrating the relative efficiency of sub-soil and surface 
drainage. On the same slope of one large field, where the soil is a 
friable clay, one half the field had been sub-drained with lines 
of tile thirty feet apart and three feet deep, and the surface left 
level between them ; the other half was plowed into lands,” or 
ridges of the same width, sloping down to ditches in the middle 
which were two feet below the level of the highest ground between 
them. After heavy rains the surface of the open-ditch part of the 
lot always glistened with moisture and was sticky for several days, 
although the descent was so rapid that the water seemed to run off 
immediately. On the sub-drained part, level as it was, the surface 
always had a dry spongy appearance, was free from superfluous 
moisture, and ready to be worked and pleasant to be walked upon 
