ON WOOD AND PLANTATIONS. 
85 
eye will repose on softly rounded masses of foliage, or 
single open groups of trees, with finely balanced, and graceful 
heads and branches. 
In order to know how a plantation in the picturesque 
mode should be treated, after it is established, we should 
reflect a moment on what constitutes picturesqueness in 
any tree. This will be found to consist, either in a certain 
natural roughness of bark, or wildness of form and outline, 
or, in some accidental curve of a branch, of striking 
manner of growth, or perhaps, of both these conjoined. A 
broken or crooked limb, a leaning trunk, or several stems 
springing from the same base, are, frequently, peculiarities 
that at once stamp a tree as picturesque. Hence, it is easy 
to see, that the excessive care of the cultivator of trees in 
the graceful school, to obtain the smoothest trunks, and the 
most sweeping, perfect, and luxuriant heads of foliage, 
is quite the opposite of what is the picturesque arboricul- 
turist’s ambition. He desires to encourage a certain wild- 
ness of growth, and allows his trees to spring up occasion- 
ally in thickets, to assist this effect ; he delights in occasional 
irregularity of stem and outline, and he therefore suffers 
his trees, here and there, to crowd each other ; he admires 
a twisted limb, or a moss covered branch, and in pruning, 
he, therefore, is careful to leave, precisely what it would be 
the aim of the other to remove ; and his pruning, where it is 
at all necessary, is directed rather towards increasing the na- 
rually striking and peculiar habit of the picturesque tree, 
than assisting it in developing a form of unusual refine- 
ment and symmetry. From these remarks, we think the 
amateur will easily divine, that planting, grouping, and 
culture in the Graceful, requires a much less educated 
feeling, than performing the same operations in the Pictu- 
