Many tree-lovers make the mistake of crowding their small private grounds with their pets. If one has only a city lot thirty feet wide by a hundred feet deep, he cannot grow a large forest. One or two large trees will be all such a place can reasonably support; any more will make the premises too crowded. The trees themselves will suffer, and, besides that, there will be no opportunity to view them. There will be no room for a flower garden, and no lawn for any purpose.
The common mistake in planting trees on small home grounds is to place the individual in the middle of the lawn. As a matter of design, the center of the lawn should be kept open, and trees, at any rate, should file along the boundaries. In our northern climate sturdy, protecting evergreens will naturally choose a north boundary, and the shady summer trees with heavy foliage will cast their comfortable shadows from the south side of the garden.
The tree-lover who hopes to get the most satisfaction out of his hobby will not always wait to see his trees grow. It requires too many years. About the best way to do is to adopt a tract of well-grown woodland, and then to make the most of it. Improvement cuttings will come first; for the axe is as important as the spade, and trees have to be cut as well as planted. The best trees can be left and nursed and admired. If there is space enough, forest effects can be developed; roads and paths can be built; game-cover can be introduced, and wild life encouraged. Birds and boys and others friends will visit you in your woods, and the days will go by like a lusty ballad. Between you and me and the beech-tree, it will be a jolly, pleasant company.
FOREST DAY
Selma Lagerlöf
On the mountain's broad back there had been a forest fire ten years before. Since that time the charred trees had been felled and removed and the great fire-swept area had begun to deck itself with green along the edges, where it skirted the healthy forest. However, the larger part of the top was still barren and appallingly desolate. Charred stumps, standing sentinel-like between the rock ledges, bore witness that once there had been a forest fire here; but no fresh shoots sprang from the ground.
One day in the early summer all the children in the parish had assembled in front of the schoolhouse near the fire-swept mountain. Each child carried either a spade or a hoe on its shoulder and a basket of food in its hand. As soon as all were assembled they marched in a long procession toward the forest. The banner came first, with the teachers on either side of it. Then followed a couple of foresters and a wagon load of pine shrubs and spruce seeds; then the children.
The procession did not pause in any of the birch groves near the settlements, but marched on deep into the forest. As it moved along the foxes stuck their heads out of their lairs in astonishment and wondered what kind of backwoods people these were. As they marched past the old coal pits where charcoal kilns were fired every autumn, the cross-beaks twisted their hooked bills and asked one another what kind of coalers these might be, who were now thronging the forest.
Finally, the procession reached the big burnt mountain plain. The rocks had been stripped of the fine twin-flower creepers that once covered them; they had been robbed of the pretty silver moss and the attractive reindeer moss. Around the dark water gathered in clefts and hollows there was now no wood-sorrel. The little patches of soil in crevices and between stones were without ferns, without star-flowers, without all the green and red and light and soft and soothing things that usually clothe the forest ground.
It was as if a bright light flashed upon the mountain when all the parish children covered it. Here again was something sweet and delicate, something fresh and rosy, something young and growing. Perhaps these children would bring to the poor abandoned forest a little new life.
When the children had rested and eaten their luncheon, they seized hoes and spades and began to work. The foresters showed them what to do. They set out shrub after shrub on every clear spot of earth they could find.