Excepting rough and unsightly waste ground

Excepting rough and unsightly waste ground

Excepting rough and unsightly waste ground

In the immediate vicinity of our large towns and cities it is seldom possible to appropriate any considerable breadth of land to ornamental purposes, excepting rough and unsightly waste ground, more or less occupied with rock or swamp; or plainer tracts, so sterile as to be comparatively worthless for cultivation. Such grounds, too, often lie bare of wood, and require planting, and a course of years to cover them with trees, even if the proprietor is willing, or desirous to devote them to such purpose. Still, there are vast sections of our country where to economize land is not important, and a mixed occupation of it to both ornament and profit may be indulged to the extent of the owner's disposition. All over the United States there are grand and beautiful sweeps and belts of cultivated country, interspersed with finely-wooded tracts, which offer the most attractive sites for the erection of dwellings on the farms which embrace them, and that require only the eye and hand of taste to convert them, with slight labor, into the finest-wooded lawns and forested parks imaginable. No country whatever produces finer trees than North America. The evergreens of the north luxuriate in a grandeur scarcely known elsewhere, and shoot their cones into the sky to an extent that the stripling pines and firs, and larches of England in vain may strive to imitate. The elm of New England towers up, and spreads out its sweeping arms with a majesty unwonted in the ancient parks or forests of Europe; while its maples, and birches, and beeches, and ashes, and oaks, and the great white-armed buttonwood, make up a variety of intervening growth, luxuriant in the extreme. Pass on through the Middle States, and into the far west, and there they still flourish with additional kinds - the tulip and poplar - the nut-trees, in all their wide variety, with a host of others equally grand and imposing, interspersed; and shrub-trees innumerable, are seen every where as they sweep along your path. Beyond the Alleghanies, and south of the great lakes, are vast natural parks, many of them enclosed, and dotted with herds of cattle ranging over them, which will show single trees, and clumps of forest that William the Conqueror would have given a whole fiefdom in his Hampshire spoliations to possess; while, stretching away toward the Gulf of Mexico, new varieties of tree are found, equally imposing, grand, and beautiful, throughout the whole vast range, and in almost every locality, susceptible of the finest possible appropriation to ornament and use. Many a one of these noble forests, and open, natural parks have been appropriated already to embellish the comfortable family establishment which has been built either on its margin, or within it; and thousands more are standing, as yet unimproved, but equally inviting the future occupant to their ample protection.