House & Garden 
burning by Ross’s English soldiers, in 1814, 
the freestone having been scorched and 
cracked about the openings. The house has 
suffered no other serious mishap, beyond 
those interior alterations wreaked upon it 
from time to time by the vagaries of fashion 
in periods when good taste waked not in our 
land. 
But all these have now been mercifully 
swept away by Mr. McKim’s restoration, 
which recalls ancient dignity to the honored 
old place. The aspect of the White House 
from the South Grounds is now balanced 
and vastly bettered by the restoration of the 
East Terrace; and the graceful colonnade, 
stretching on either hand from the house, is 
delightfully effective. It is proposed to 
build a formal garden across the whole 
length of the south front of the house and 
arcades. This, and also a mooted revision 
of the landscape treatment of the remaining 
grounds, would add much to the present en¬ 
semble. But these projects of the architects 
are, as yet, indefinite. 
MR. OLMSTED ON TREE PRUNING 
W HEN asked by a correspondent for 
information upon the practice of “top¬ 
ping ” street trees Mr. Frederick Law 
Olmsted, Jr., replied the other day upon 
tree-pruning in general as follows: 
Any pruning, or cutting off' of the branches 
of a tree or shrub, is done for one or more 
of the following reasons: t.—T o remove 
useless or injurious parts, such as dead, 
rotting or injured branches. 2 .—To stimu¬ 
late the growth of the remaining parts. 
3.—To control the size and shape of the 
plant. Sometimes, indeed, it is done without 
any clear purpose in view because the pruner 
has nothing else to occupy his time, or out 
of a blind and unintelligent aping of what 
has been done elsewhere. It is needless to 
say that unless there is a perfectly definite 
purpose to be served by pruning it is, at the 
least, foolish, and may be destructive. 
In regard to the method of pruning and its 
applicability especially when directed toward 
the first two purposes above mentioned, a 
a very clear brief statement will be found in 
Des Carys’ pamphlet on “ I'ree Pruning,” 
and a fuller discussion will be found in L. H. 
Bailey’s “ Pruning Book.” It is very rarely 
indeed, that the “ topping” of a tree by the 
removal of the main stem and all the branches 
large and small down to a nearly uniform 
level, is called for either in order to remove 
unhealthy parts or in order to stimulate growth 
in the rest of the tree, and in any such case 
the effect upon the shape of the tree is so 
marked that it also becomes an important 
consideration. 
The pruning and clipping of trees and 
shrubs in order to control their shape and 
sizes, is not infrequently necessary in order 
to produce certain results, but one ought 
to be very certain that those are the 
results suitable to the case in hand 
before beginning to prune. As regards 
street trees, people very often plant, in 
comparatively small streets, trees of a sort 
that will, if left to themselves, grow to 
such size and shape as to crowd and darken 
the houses and actually cumber the street, 
while at the same time they are themselves 
crowded out of their normal development 
and become misshapen and ultimately 
diseased. The wise plan is, of course, to 
choose in the beginning the kind of tree 
best suited to the probable future conditions 
of each street, but unfortunately that is 
seldom done, and therefore pruning becomes 
needful. 
But, if in order to limit the size of a tree 
or even to control its shape, all its twigs and 
branches which project beyond a given outline 
are cut off' at just the point where they pass 
beyond the “dead line,” two other results are 
accomplished, which very strikingly alter the 
appearance of the tree. The “texture” of 
its foliage surface is changed from that of a 
mass of leaves which catches the light and 
shadow, waving or tossing or fluttering or 
shimmering with the breeze in its own par- 
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