SECTION II. CHARACTERS OF TREES. REES when young, like striplings, shoot into taper forms. There is a lightness and an airiness in them which is pleasing; but they do not spread, and receive their just proportions, till they have attained their full growth. There is as much difference, too, in trees (I mean in trees of the same kind) in point of beauty, as there is in human figures. The limbs of some are set on awkwardly; their trunks are disproportioned, and their whole form is unpleasing. The same rules which establish elegance in other objects, establish it in these. There must be the same harmony of parts, the same sweeping line, the same contrast, the same ease and freedom. A bough, indeed, may issue from its trunk at right angles, and yet elegantly, as it frequently does in the Oak; but it must immediately form some contrasting sweep, or the junction will be awkward. All forms, that are unnatural, displease. A tree lopped into a may-pole, as you generally see in the hedgerows of Surrey and some other counties, is disgusting. Clipped Yews, Lime hedges, and pollards, for the same reason, are disagreeable and yet I have sometimes seen a pollard produce a good effect, when Nature has been suffered, for some years, to bring it again into form but I never saw a good effect produced by a pollard on which some single stem was left to grow into a tree. The stem is of a different growth: it is disproportioned, and always unites awkwardly with the trunk. Our Author here speaks in the character of a true lover of Nature, expressing his dislike of the hideous practice of trimming' trees into unnatural shapes-a practice which was much more common in the last century than it is at present. Even now, however, the art of topiary |