280 
A COMPARISON OF THE 
Fig. 57. 
make an elm look like an oak, but rather brings into higher relief 
the distinguishing marks of each, making the elm more graceful, 
and the oak more majestic. Yet uncommon thriftiness changes 
the forms of some trees so much that specimens growing in the 
shade of the forest, stinted by want of sunlight, and crowded by 
roots of rival trees, are tall, lank, and straggling in limb, with scanty 
foliage; while the same species grown in rich open ground becomes 
glorious with its breadth and weighty masses of foliaged boughs. 
Who would know the common chestnut in the forest by its form, as 
the same tree that spreads its arms in the open field with all the 
majesty of the oak? Or the “mast-timber” branchless white pine 
of a Maine forest as the same tree that forms in open ground a 
broad-based pyramid of evergreen foliage, and broods with its vast 
branches like a broad-winged bird upon a meadow-nest ? The crooked 
sassafras of the woods, Fig. 57, running up as if 
uncertain what point in the heavens to aim at, 
and at what height to put out its arms, seems as 
unhappy there as a cultured citizen forced to 
spend his life among thfe Camanches. But the 
same tree, in rich soil in the open sun, expands 
naturally, as in Fig. 58, into one of the most 
beautiful heads of foliage among small trees. 
Few trees attain a full measure of thrift that are 
not fully exposed east, south, and west to the sun. We do not 
mean to assert that trees will not be beautiful without such com¬ 
plete exposure, but that, to realize the highest 
beauty of which any one specimen is capable, it 
must be so exposed. A greater variety of beauty 
is obtained from a group made up of more than 
one species of tree, thus contrasting several sorts 
of foliage and form, than from a single tree which 
might have grown to cover the same space; and 
we therefore sacrifice the highest type of indi¬ 
perfection to produce more striking effects with several 
But the same fact must be observed with reference to the 
group;—its full beauty can only be realized by having the trees 
in luxuriant growth; and open, collectively, on all sides to the sun. 
Fig. 58. 
vidual 
trees. 
