BUILDING SITES. 
33 
Occasionally, in rocky situations, or on the border of a running 
brook, such sites may be charmingly harmonized with the practical 
requirements of the dwelling and outbuildings; but they are excep¬ 
tional. The great mass of house sites are smooth swells or levels. 
Trees already grown are invaluable. To have them, or not to 
have them, is, to speak in business phrase, to begin with capital or 
without it. As capital draws to itself capital, so trees are magnets 
of home beauty, towards which domestic architecture, the gardener’s 
arts, and varied family enjoyments are most naturally attracted. But 
there are trees whose age and habits of growth are not such as to 
give them high value. Forest trees, which have attained a lofty 
height, are not only dangerous in proximity to a dwelling, but are 
also likely to maintain a sort of living death when their contempo¬ 
rary trees are cut from around them—putting forth their leaves 
annually, it is true, but dying limb by limb at their summits, and 
scattering on the ground their dead twigs and branches. No 
grandeur of lofty trunk can mitigate the danger from spring 
winds or summer tempests that may bring its crushing weight 
upon the house and its inmates. But trees which have grown 
broadly in open ground, and lashed their arms and toughened their 
fibres in the gales of half a century, may be relied on to brood pro- 
tectingly over a home ; and few among these are more loveable in 
blossom, shade, and fruit, than fine old apple-trees. There is 
another class of trees which have little beauty as environments of 
a dwelling. We refer to “ second-growth ” trees, which have grown 
thickly together, and which, though valuable for their shade, form 
rather a nursery of rough poles, with a valuable mass of foliage 
over them, than an ornamental grove. Rough woods are quite too 
common in this country, and too rude in all their looks and ways, 
to be welcomed to our cultivated homes as we welcome the civil¬ 
ized and polished members of the tree family. But such dense 
groves of second-growth trees usually have many specimens among 
them well worth preserving, and which, if twenty feet high or up¬ 
wards, will better repay good nursing and care than any young 
tiees that can be planted to fill their places. The proprietor of 
such a building site is much more likely to err, however, in leaving 
too many than too few; and the thorough cutting out of the grove, 
3 
