What Can be Done in Ten Years 
ugliness, and the freshly graded knoll on 
which it stood was innocent of grass. 
We had planned a place for three trees— 
a willow, a cut-leaved white maple and a 
Norway maple ; but the generous friend who 
had offered them to us unexpectedly enlarged 
the gift to a dozen, which had to be accom¬ 
modated without due reflection in the stretch 
of loam which we figuratively called lawn. 
When one has a piece of ground with 
nothing on it, and a number of saplings 
about the size of a hoe-handle to plant 
there, it seems a matter of small importance 
to the unlearned where they are set. You 
take for granted that 
half of them will die, 
and that the best use 
to put them to will be 
to protect each other. 
You realize that they 
must not be in straight 
lines, nor too near to¬ 
gether; but unless you 
are experienced, it is 
the most difficult thing 
to imagine how they 
will look in the far dis¬ 
tant future when they 
are grown up. So you 
dig holes, recklessly 
rush in and out of 
the house to see the 
effect of stakes, and 
generally succeed in getting them in the 
wrong place. This is, of course, where the 
landscape architect should come in, but as 
the proverb hath it, “the destruction of the 
poor is their poverty,” and in our case, 
unless he had been in our pocket, he would 
have been of no use at that particular 
moment, when the unexpected trees arrived. 
There is nothing like experience to teach, 
and now I know that before the house was 
built everything should have been mapped 
out—house here, trees there, in proper 
groups and relations, trusting to luck for 
some one to send the furnishings when the 
place was ready for them. T his is really 
the proper way to go to work, but when we 
began our planting those ideas had not been 
so thoroughly set before the public as they 
are now, and we had to earn our experience 
at the price of much unnecessary labor. 
Undoubtedly one should have the land¬ 
scape architect if he can be afforded ; and if 
not, there should certainly be some sort of 
design to work upon. 1 say this with feel¬ 
ing, because almost all our things lived; and 
after struggling through a precarious infancy, 
many of them had to be dragged up by the 
roots just as soon as they really began to 
take hold, and removed to a different spot 
where they would not be in the way. 
In the beginning tree culture is one long 
battle, and so much thought and attention 
are necessary that it is easy to understand 
why one so often hears people say that it is 
of no use to plant trees about a place, be¬ 
cause one will never live to get the benefit of 
them. This, however, is a great mistake. 
It is surprising how much a well planted tree 
will grow even in three years, and how 
changed the aspect of the most barren 
grounds will become at the end of that time. 
The difficulty is that the planter seldom re¬ 
alizes the patient care necessary to nurse the 
sapling through its second summer, when it 
should really be as much a source of anxiety 
as a baby. Almost any tree will stand its 
first season if well watered, but when it 
starts to grow in the following spring, it is a 
mistake to believe that it is out of danger, 
and to leave it to take care of itself through 
wind and drought, because it has shown 
signs of vigor early in the season. 
Staking, watering, and mulching, digging 
about the roots, protecting the leaves from 
i 86 
