BOUNDARUES, GATES AND FENCES.


thus prevent the appearance of too much sameness, which ought
at all times to be avoided.
The common practice of planting alternately oak, elm, lime,
fir, larch, beech, birch, and again repeating oak, elm, lime, and
so on, or any other order of arrangement upon the same errone-
ous system, is absurd, and wholly unlike the broad and bold
workings of nature, and is incapable of producing good effect
or suitable variety; for although the trees be various, and have
in themselves the principles of opposition and contrast in a big-h
degree, yet when disposed in this way, and so mingled together,
every twenty rods of it will be but the repetition of the former
twenty rods; and although the plantation should be twenty
miles round, it is capable of affording no variety beyond that of
each tree's actual identity, which at a distance cannot be recog-
nized. Such plantations always look dull and heavy in colour,
in consequence of the complete mixture of the bright and the
dark together-so black and vhite, the greatest of all contrasts,
when blended become grey; thus, too, the most brilliant primi-
tive colours, red, blue, and yellow, when mixed together, form
a dusky hue, nearly approaching to a sooty black. The prac-
tice is so obviously bad, that it must necessarily be soon aban-
doned, and where the error has already been committed, the
remedy must be applied when the plantations are thinned; at
which time much of the objection may be removed, and a great
deal of the effect desired may be obtained.
The projector in his general plan will do well to mark the
nature of the soils if they differ, and form his first arrangements
and selections from these circumstances. As one soil may be
suitable to several kinds, he may next plan them in masses,
conformably to suitableness, contrast, opposition and harmony
of form and colour-not abruptly placing them in masses of oak,
elm, and other trees, but as it were dovetailing them into each


45