Japan appears to be doing as much to adorn our lawns and gardens as our drawing-rooms; and from this and other foreign lands much that is beautiful or curious is coming annually to our shores.  At the same time I was convinced of the wisdom of Mr. Fuller’s appreciation of our native trees.  In few instances should we have to go far from home to find nearly all that we wanted in beautiful variety—­maples, dogwoods, scarlet and chestnut oaks, the liquid-amber, the whitewood or tulip-tree, white birch, and horn-beam, or the hop-tree; not to speak of the evergreens and shrubs indigenous to our forests.  Perhaps it is not generally known that the persimmon, so well remembered by old campaigners in Virginia, will grow readily in this latitude.  There are forests of this tree around Paterson, N. J., and it has been known to endure twenty-seven degrees below zero.  It is a handsome tree at any season, and its fruit in November caused much straggling from our line of march in the South.  Then there is our clean-boled, graceful beech, whose smooth white bark has received so many tender confidences.  In the neighborhood of a village you will rarely find one of these trees whereon is not linked the names of lovers that have sat beneath the shade.  Indeed I have found mementoes of trysts or rambles deep in the forest of which the faithful beech has kept the record until the lovers were old or dead.  On an immense old beech in Tennessee there is an inscription which, while it suggests a hug, presents to the fancy an experience remote from a lover’s embrace.  It reads, “D.  Boone cilled bar on tree.”

There is one objection to the beech which also lies against the white oak—­it does not drop its leaves within the space of a few autumn days.  The bleached foliage is falling all winter long, thus giving the ground near an untidy aspect.  With some, the question of absolute neatness is paramount; with others, leaves are clean dirt, and their rustle in the wind does not cease to be music even after they have fallen.

Speaking of native trees and shrubs, we shall do well to use our eyes carefully during our summer walks and drives; for if we do, we can scarcely fail to fall in love with types and varieties growing wild.  They will thrive just as well on the acre if properly removed.  In a sense they bring the forest with them, and open vistas at our door deep into the heart of Nature.  The tree is not only a thing of beauty in itself, but it represents to the fancy all its wild haunts the world over.

In gratifying our taste for native trees we need not confine ourselves to those indigenous to our own locality.  From the nurseries we can obtain specimens that beautify other regions of our broad land; as, for instance, the Kentucky yellow-wood, the papaw, the Judas-tree, and, in the latitude of New Jersey and southward, the holly.