PAF.K AND CEMETERY. 
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and to thrive on a minimum amount of water. Its thin 
foliaged nature is also well adapted to the close plant- 
ing, as it gives shade without darkening the street and 
the buildings. European lindens and horse chestnuts 
seem to be second in popularity, and occasionally a 
line of Norway maples, or elms, both English and 
American, are found. Our common roadside locust 
(Robinia pseudacacia) is also often seen and of much 
greater size than obtains with us. 
Pollarding, or heavy heading-back, is the general 
practice with all their trees. By this means the trees 
are kept comparatively low headed, say 50 feet in 
height at the most, and the side branches are likewise 
cut back so that a tree just touches finger-tips with its 
neighbors on either hand. Heading-back in this fash- 
ion is also practiced a good deal in our South and in 
California. In the latter state it is not unusual to see 
in winter a whole street with its great Eucalyptus trees 
cut down to twenty-foot stubs, and with not a branch 
showing. Those trees seem to thrive under such treat- 
ment, and some varieties of Eucalyptus are much im- 
proved in form by this means. But in the northern 
states it is not only unnecessary, as a rule, to pollard, 
but it mutilates the tree and robs it of all its natural 
grace and symmetry. Occasionally a weak tree can be 
revived by a judicious cutting back to reduce the leaf 
area and give the roots less work to do, but great good 
judgment is required in such work, and even then the 
remedy often fails. 
The effect of the pollarding on the Paris trees was 
anything but agreeable to my Yankee tastes. All the 
native beauty of the trees was gone and in its place was 
the formality of a clipped hedge. In fact it was not un- 
common to see elms with their lower foliage clipped 
back all around into a square form, say six feet wide on 
a side. All the trees are high pruned, so that it is a 
good fifteen to twenty feet to the lower branches, and 
when an elm is box clipped, as above, this cutting is 
carried up for another fifteen feet. The top is then 
cut back just enough to make a round fluff of foliage 
on top. 
Paris is not cursed with overhead electric wires, so 
that nothing could be learned there on that burning 
subject, but her streets are still largely lighted with gas, 
and I was informed that many street trees are killed 
each year by escaping gas. Certain it is that the trees 
die there, just as they do with us, and not from old age 
apparently, for I saw few street trees that appeared to 
be more than forty to fifty years of age. Yet it was 
not uncommon to see a newly planted tree, often sev- 
eral in succession, in rows of much older trees. 
And in this replacement of trees I met with another 
disappointment. Often have I heard, and even read, 
that when a street tree died in Paris it was at once re- 
placed by a large tree. I had wondered how this was 
done, and now I know. The new trees are, in fact. 
larger than those we commonly set out in the United 
States, but they are not large trees. They are on the 
average about twenty to twenty-five feet tall, and about 
three to four inches in breast-high diameter. That is 
easy. We can do that if we will pay for the larger 
stock, and will provide big tree-pits, well stocked with 
good loam, and finally plant with care. 
The Paris tree-pits are about six by four feet on the 
surface and four feet deep, and filled with the best of 
loam. A new tree is set with great care, and bound to 
a single pole nearly or quite as thick and tall as the 
tree, pole and tree being lashed together closely with 
soft hemp at three or four points, the last tie being 
well up into the top. 
The tree-planted streets, or boulevards, of Paris are 
all broad and spacious compared with any standard, 
the sidewalks often' being twenty to twenty-five feet 
wide. With such a layout they can afford to provide 
plenty of room for the trees. Sometimes the sidewalk 
pavement is carried out to the curb line between the 
tree pits, and each pit, which in such cases is somewhat 
sunken below the grade, is covered with an Iron grill 
which encircles the tree. A much commoner practice, 
so far as I was able to observe, is to stop the paving of 
the sidewalk at the inner edge of the pits and cover the 
remainder of the walk, and the surface of the pits also, 
with a fine gravel. In these cases no grills are used, 
but in summer each tree has the gravel raked away 
from it, in a six-foot circle, the dirt being piled up in a 
little dike to form a rain-holding saucer. In times of 
drought the men who sprinkle the streets (and this is 
done with a hose attached to hydrants) fill up the 
saucers as they go along. 
Guards around the trunks are seldom seen. Those I 
did notice were mostly of narrow iron slats, and put 
on in two half-round sections. Apparently Parisian 
horses are better trained, or better fed, than ours, for, 
notwithstanding that the unguarded trees are near 
enough the curb for a horse to reach (two to three feet 
inside), I did not find a single tree that showed horse- 
gnawing. 
There remains one other subject connected with 
street tree culture that just now so vitally concerns 
many of our cities and towns, to wit, the foliage-de- 
stroying insects. Several of the most destructive of 
our insects, the gypsy and brown-tail moths and the 
elm leaf-beetle for example, are natives of Europe, and 
have long been known in France. But not a sign of a 
caterpillar of any sort did I see in early July, either in 
the trees of the streets, of the parks, or in the woods on 
the outskirts of the city, or in the great forest of Fon- 
tainebleu, which is nearly forty miles south of Paris. 
Nowhere did the foilage look as if an insect had ever 
so much as crawled over it. The leaves everywhere 
looked whole and bright. 
