HOW TO MARK A COUNTRY PLACE. 
44 ? 
could be instituted, always appear to disadvantage in 
connection with the forest, besides the injury to their 
progress from the roots and drip of their hungry and 
uncouth companions. 
There is, to be sure a certain class or condition of 
wood which chance or design has from year to year 
thinned out, and cattle cleared of undergrowth, re- 
sembling the oak openings of the West, which becomes 
after a while a sort of natural park, most desirable for 
country residences, but the thick, tangled, inextricable 
wood which will not readily admit any amelioration, 
but always returns for your attempted improvement, 
sickly and dying trees, pointing at you from every direc- 
tion their weird and skeleton limbs, as if in derision 
and mockery at your efforts, had better be left alone in 
its wildness, or no attempts made to reform it. 
The proper way, we have always thought, to make a 
country place, where there are no trees already existing, 
is, as we have already described as in Mr. Hunnewell’s 
case, to dig an irregular border all round the boundary, 
or at least on those sides exposed to public roads or dis- 
agreeable objects, and to plant this with a judicious 
mixture of deciduous and evergreen trees of two or 
three feet high, either imported from Europe for a few 
dollars the hundred, or purchased from our own nurseries 
at wholesale prices. 
We do not mean by this to be understood as recom- 
mending one of those formal belts so much employed 
in the time of Brown, but a picturesque boundary, with 
bays and recesses, and projecting curves, occasionally 
employing the denser and more umbrageous trees where 
distant and unsightly objects are to be excluded ; and 
again the lowest growing shrubs to admit the landscape 
beyond the boundaries when it is desirable to do so. 
This border may, the first few years, be employed 
as a nursery for the purpose of receiving all the trees, 
shrubs and plants required for the future and entire 
