440 
LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 
of vitality in their lower branches, as low as there was 
yonng wood enough to carry on the circulation. Many 
trees seventy feet in height, we thus reduced to thirty 
and forty. This formed a thicket of background from 
which we took, year by year, the weakest and most 
misshapen ; so that a mass, composed, eighteen years ago, 
of fifty or sixty trees, seventy or seventy-five feet high, 
is now reduced to twenty or thirty trees only forty 
feet high, but denser, and covering much more space 
than double the number of original trees. Where 
necessary to obtain certain extended views, we cut boldly 
and irregularly through the mass, producing, after some 
years growth, the effect as represented in Fig. 88, 
entitled, “View from Library Window.” Where we 
accomplished two distinct landscapes — the one includ- 
ing a charmingly wooded point called “ Presqu-ile,” 
the residence of Mr. Denning, with a distant view of 
Idlewild, the residence of K. P. Willis, across the 
river ; and the other a portion of Pollapells’ island — 
with a fine effect of the Dunderberg or Storm King, 
as background. 
But, in process of time, finding that from the irregular 
shape of the house — a view of the river side of which 
appears as frontispiece to this Supplement — we could, by 
careful planting against the masses forming the bound- 
aries to the view referred to (Fig. 88), not only produce 
more agreeable and ornamental effects from the win- 
dows, but confine to each window one distinct and 
separate view, which should be seen from that one 
window and that alone — while it had also the effect of 
lengthening and extending the vistas, making, as it 
were, a series of cabinet pictures — we advanced an 
irregular plantation of the most ornamental, trees in 
front of these two masses, completely masking them; 
and while very much extending the view by an apparent 
and, indeed, an actual elongation, also substituting from 
the windows an ornamental grouping between the house 
