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A sure key to a developer's tree sense, apart from his placement of the house and the care shown in grading is his treatment of the driveway. Pennies pinched by slamming a driveway in on the shortest course, without regard for good trees, are dollars thrown away. Roots ripped or hacked off to let in concrete or blacktop could just as well have been pruned carefully and the trees' necessity for food and top-pruning recognized. The writer has vivid memory of four fine oaks in front of a $55,000 "development" home near Princeton, N.J., which were plainly slaughtered by such thoughtlessness. Not far from that house is another new one where a dozen tall hardwoods in the front grounds are now grisly skeletons just because about eight inches of soil, excavated from the cellar hole, were spread over their roots instead of being hauled away. In the Saturday Evening Post (January 28, 1961), Charlton Ogburn, Jr., estimated that the nation's metropolitan population will increase by sixty million in the next year, of which twenty-five million will move into new houses in suburbs. Mr. Ogburn, a park commissioner of Virginia's fast-growing Fairfax County, across the Potomac from Washington, canvassed a lot of land planners, architects, and builders with this question in mind: "Will the land for the oncoming developments be scalped and flattened, or will the new dwellings be fitted into the existing terrain with minimum destruction of trees and undergrowth? . . . The answer will make an important difference in the kind of country we have to live in—and in the kind of people we are. . . . When . . . our dwellings seem to belong where they are, to be parts of their surroundings rather than invaders, we ourselves seem to gain a sense of belonging, of having roots. We even gain some of the serenity which is apt to be the scarcest commodity of all in the abundant life." |
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