The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Landscape Gardening

Select List Of Trees

Many large tries, especially elms, about a house, are a sure indication of family distinction and worth. Any evidence of care bestowed on these trees receives the traveler's respect as for a nobler husbandry than the raising of corn and potatoes.
Henry David Thoreau
It will not do to be exclusive in our tastes about trees. There is hardly one of them which has not peculiar beauties in some fitting place for it. Oliver Wendell Holmes.
In any save the smallest places the trees form the framework of the plantings. They are the first to be considered, and the first to be placed. And unless they arc felicitously selected and happily placed and well grown the whole composition is apt to fall to pieces, since it lacks the necessary framework.

Moreover, trees are sometimes able to make a whole landscape by themselves. A forest is always beautiful. And if there are pleasant openings, with long perspectives, and views of wooded hills, or of craggy mountains, or of river, lake or sea, the landscape requires little else to make it satisfying to the most fastidious taste.

Then, too, a tree is a beautiful thing by itself. Each good tree has its own peculiar and sufficient beauties, and even the blasted and storm-torn tree may make a fascinating picture. In all large plantings there should be included a number of specimen trees, so placed as to show their individual good qualities, and so grown as to possess those good qualities in the greatest measure.

For all these reasons the selection of suitable trees becomes one of the landscape gardener's first and most important duties. Familiarity with trees and a sympathetic understanding of their manners and moods is the best basis on which to make this choice; but the following notes, which make no claim to completeness, may be of some service to those who have not made trees a special study.

APPLE.—All apple trees are beautiful, probably none more so than the common apple of the orchards. This dignified and highly domestic tree may be planted on lawns and in parks with a free hand. Other kinds, like Pyrus floribunda, P. sargenti, and Bechtel's crab are excellent ornamental sorts and worthy of a good place in every domestic plan.

ASH.—There are three or four native species of ash which may usually be collected from the woods or bought from the nurseries. All are good. They are excellent for large masses, and will bear comparatively thick planting.

BEECH.—The common American beech is a fine tree where it will succeed. It is not practicable to mass it except in waste places, on hillsides, and the like. An occasional single tree in rich soil makes a specimen to be proud of.