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The first two are of course controllable through the soil. Less obviously, so is the third. When a young tree is transplanted, air for its roots is just as important as for its upper parts. Infant mortality among trees in new grounds results more often from suffocation than from any other cause. There is a sorry tendency, even among tree merchants who should know better, to plant young stock too deeply or in ground not loosened widely enough around the questing new roots. Worried that their plantings may blow over, people plunk them into narrow, hard-walled holes and pound them tight. Then they drench them with too much water, stuff them with too much food, fuss over them and peek at the roots to see "how they are doing." The time to peek at roots is when you buy the tree, or dig it afield yourself. But let us come to that phase of treescaping a naked acre after considering the overall plan. One of the first and most talented Americans to be called "landscape architect," the late great Frederic Law Olmsted, was irritated by the title. He said: "Landscape is not a good word; architecture is not; the combination is not. Gardening is worse. . . . The art is not gardening nor is it architecture. ... It is the sylvan art, fine art in the distinction from Horticulture, Agriculture, or the sylvan useful art." He defined his work, which was usually on the grandest scale, in terms too sweeping to apply to our small naked-acre problems. Olmsted cleared headlands to display their lofty contours. He felled whole woods to reveal distant mountain heights or valley depths. He restored the natural sweep of watercourses, adjusted the sites of ugly structures "with a motive to avoid unnecessary jar upon the foreground of a soothing prospect." And yet his catalog of work elements ends in "fixing . . . the position and outlines of a stable . . . the course of a walk ... or the height of a fence or of a hencoop . . . the answer in one word is—design." |
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