SPRING WORK FOR PUBLIC-SPIRITED MEN.
Shade-trees.—One of the first things that will require your action is, the planting of shade-trees. Get your neighbors to join with you. Agree to do four times as much as your share, and you will, perhaps, then obtain some help. Try to get some more to do the same in each street of your village or town.
Locusts, of course you will set for immediate shade. They will in three years afford you a delightful verdant umbrella as long as the street. But maples form a charming row, and the autumnal tints of their leaves and the spring flowers add to their beauty. They grow quite rapidly, and in six years, if the soil is good and the trees properly set, they will begin to cast a decided shadow. Elms are, by far, the noblest tree that can be set, but they will have their own time to grow. It is best then to set them in a row of other trees, at about fifty or a hundred feet apart, the intervening space to be occupied with quicker-growing varieties.
The beech, buckeye, horse-chesnut, sycamore, chestnut, and many others may be employed with advantage. Now, do not let your court-house square look any longer so barren.
Avenues may be lined with rows of trees, but squares and open spaces should have them grouped or scattered in small knots and parcels in a more natural manner.
May-weed.—There was never a better time to exterminate this villainous, stinking weed than summer-time will be. Just as soon as the first blossoms show, “up and at it.” Club together in your streets and agree to spend one day a-mowing. Keep it down thoroughly for one season and it will no longer bedrabble your wife’s and daughter’s dresses, nor fill the air with its pungent stench, or weary the eye with its everlasting white and yellow.
Side-walks. What if your neighbors are lazy; what if
they do not care? Some one ought to see that there are good gravel walks in each village. You can have them in this way: Take your horse and cart and make them before your own grounds, and then go on no matter who owns, and when your neighbors see that you have public spirit, they will, by and by, be ready to help you. But the grand way to do nothing, is, not to lift a finger yourself, and then to rail at your fellow-citizens as selfish and devoid of all public spirit.