Green-Mountain freeman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1844-1884, 1873-05-14
WaySide Shrubbery.

There are some persons in the world
whose ideas of beauty run almost entirely
into waving lines, smoothness, and rotundi-
ty. They cannot bear to see anything In
landscape that does not convey the senti-
ment Of costly dressing and ornamental
ton, In their sight nothing is so beauti
tul as a well-trimmed hedge-row, or a nice
ly painted fence. They abhor appearance
OF rudeness about their grounds, or any
thing that is not an evidence Of wealth and
L" aesthetic culture .; believing that the
more completely Nature is subdued by
Art, the more credit she reflects upon her
owner They regard Nature as they do
their horse, and believe, if she can be
made to look sleek and plump, they have
fully carried out one OF the bene6oent
designs Of Providence, whom they regard
as the great teacher Of aesthetics
Unfortunate are the picturesque old
roads that fall under the management
of this class of men, when employed as
surveyors of the highways. In their view,
no spontaneous production of nature should
remain there, except the gravel. Not even
tree must be tolerated, unless 1t was
planted there by human hands. All wild
growths Of shrubbery are condemned to
perish. 1t by-road be embroidered with
charming variety of native shrubs and
herbaceous plants, at one season adorned
with flowers. at another with fruits, and at
all times with foliage, they send the plough
directly into this mass, to carry out their
ideas of neatness and smoothness, and to
expel Nature as it she were a Gorgon or
a Hydra.
The passers on this by-road formerly
wended their way along footpath
through its various shrubbery and the
children Of the village, as they went tc
school aud returned, would often linger
here to gather flowers and fruit, sitting
down upon some green tussock, under the
shady protection of hatf-grown trees
which had come up without planting
They watched the viburnum, with its cir
cular cymes of white flowers. succeeded by
blue, white, and purple berries; the wild
roses that clustered there in June, and
the glycine that festooned the thicket:
with dark flowers in August. They ad-
mired the charming negligence of these
growths, some with upright stems sup
porting the twining convolvulus, inter
woven with the dark-blue flowers of the
woody nightshade, and others climbing
overhead and forming an arbor for a sum-
mer MONDAY. The surveyor and his gang
have spoiled the footpath, and destroyed
the bushes with their flowers and fruit
and children, ,'no less than birds lament, this
destruction Of their pleasant wayside
haunts. Ever since my boyhood have
these vandals of the roads been deservedy
cursed as the despoilers of nature, and the
clumsy agents of tasteful imposture.
There Is another class of despoilers who
: pursue their operations as private citizens
They are generally "model farmers, :
men who think that nature should be made
, subservient to labor, and labor to capital
If you stroll along by the estates of these
industrious vandals, you will be strucl
with the badness and nakedness of the
; borders of their fields. Not shrub no
vine can with impunity lift its hea(
above the ground on either side of thei
| fences, and squirrel that should ventur
g near them would be hunted like an adder
We may distinguish the possessions o
these model farmers by observing, as W
pass by, their singular blankness, such a
: you observe in the face of an over-fed idiot
=! Their Nature is young damsel with he
/ hair tied up in knots and papers, as dis
y tinguished from one whose tresses ham,
D down her neck in careless freedom
: : They will tell you that wild shrubber,
harbors vcrmin, and that its in.ricac,
$ affords them shelter, which is not provides
by formal hedge-row. But if it harbor
: insects, it protects also the birds that fee
t upon them; if it causes the multiplicatio
a Of small quadrupeds, it supplies also th
!. mast that sustains them In proportio
, as the thicket has been eradicated froI
. the borders of fields and waysides, the il
sects that destroy our crops have il
It creased; for the birds that once foun
! protection within it have fled to distal