ON WOOD AND PLANTATIONS. 
83 
ing groups, as painters love to study and introduce into 
their pictures. Sturdy and bright vines, or such as are 
themselves picturesque in their festoons and hangings, 
should be allowed to clamber over occasional trees in a 
negligent manner ; and the surface and grass, in parts of 
the scene not immediately in the neighborhood of the 
mansion, may be kept short by the cropping of animals, or 
allowed to grow in a more careless and loose state, like that 
of tangled dells and natural woods. 
There will be the same open glades in picturesque as in 
beautiful plantations ; but these * openings, in the former, 
will be bounded by groups and thickets of every form, and 
of different degrees of intricacy, while in the latter the 
eye will repose on softly rounded masses of foliage, or sin- 
gle 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 sweep- 
ing, perfect, and luxuriant heads of foliage, is quite the 
opposite of what is the picturesque arboriculturist's ambi- 
tion. He desires to encourage a certain wildness of growth, 
and allows his trees to spring up occasionally in thickets 
