HOW TO MAKE A COUNTRY PLACE. 
449 
satisfaction will be the result ; because one may not 
only make up their own mind by studying their groups 
of poles, for weeks or months, even, but they can also 
have the advantage of criticism from intelligent visitors, 
and if the poles are wrong it is much easier to remove 
them than the trees. 
If it were our object to make the most thorough place 
with the greatest expedition and fewest mistakes, we 
should plant every group, mass, and single specimen in 
poles, and allow them to remain when the trees were 
both in and out of leaf, in order to be quite certain 
that the planting worked equally well in all seasons, 
and also to study and be quite sure we were right in 
the harmony and selection we made of varieties for 
forming groups and masses. 
Although the process may seem slow and tedious to 
new beginners, yet we are quite sure a place thus 
treated will, at the end of four or live years, be far more 
advanced and much more judiciously and successfully 
planted than by the more ordinary and hasty method. 
In the first place, there will be no mistakes — no un- 
doing — on the contrary, the planting of the place is the 
making of the border : and in the second place, the trees 
will be better specimens, because we may at our leisure 
select from our border the best plants, and have them 
much better planted, inasmuch as when the spot for the 
tree is selected, the hole may be dug months, if neces- 
sary, before used — which, for spring planting, is most 
advantageous, by submitting the soil to the action of the 
frost. Whereas in the usual method, we go to a nursery 
and order a certain quantity of plants, and when they 
arrive, possibly on a disagreeable, windy day, we set 
about in the greatest hurry to dig holes and plant our 
trees, without in the least knowing the effects they are 
to make or mar when fully grown. 
It is this careless method which produces so much 
bad planting and ruins so many country places. How 
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