Where fill is unavoidable, have spacious stone or cinder-block wells laid up quickly around buttress roots, and a scattering of drain tiles—up-ended and filled with small rock—embedded over root systems to provide ventilation and irrigation. Contractors are perfectly able to do these things, if you insist.

Where roots must be cut, or are damaged regardless, feed these trees and have their tops pruned, to compensate, as soon as possible. Equally prompt should be repairs to torn limbs, butt scars, and bark wounds. (See Chapters V and VI.)

In deciding which trees to retain and feature in your new grounds, be practical. Some softwoods like silver maple, the willows, and poplars make a pretty show, but are short-lived. If they do not interfere with hardier species, well and good. Otherwise give preference to more durable stand-bys—the oaks, beech, ash, sugar maple, tupelo, honey locust, sassafras, shagbark hickory (but not the smooth bark, or pignut, which has small character).

Sycamore, sweet gum, horse chestnut, and black walnut are all hardy species, but you will like them better away from your house than near it. They drop fruits that can be bothersome underfoot.

All flowering trees you will favor as a matter of course-dogwood, redbud, hawthorn, shadblow, and any of the wild-grown fruits like apple, pear, and cherry (but not chokecherry, in which tent caterpillars spawn). Locust and catalpa are attractive in flower but are better kept toward the property's edges for they are shedders too, the one of deadwood, the other of elephant-ear leaves and trashy bean pods. Lindens (basswood) and mulberries are more welcome: they bring bees and birds, respectively. So are the paper and gray birches: their graceful white stems are like dancing girls.