I have planted not far short of a hundred trees
in my 'garden and its surround, so that I did not relish having to fell one of the biggest and finest. This was a balsam poplar, the nearest to the house of a line of them planted for the dual purpose of a windbreak and to waft their intoxicatingly spicy spring-balm over the whole area. But my land is on clay, and poplars are shallow-rooted. Ominous cracks in the house-walls revealed that this noble tree, which had grown nearly 70 feet in 16 years, was the culprit. For the roots travel' Many yards, and in dry weather their thirst causes shrinkage and so cracking both in the soil and any, building near them. It took us a whole day to fell that tree. First, the boughs had to be sawn off, and with them 30 feet of the trunk-top ; then by axe, beetle and wedge the bole above the stump was half-severed to lean against the next tree. Lastly, the stump and its huge roots had to be wrenched out with pickaxe and crowbar. What Donne in one of his rare bursts of rural and visual imagery called
the Household bird with the red Stomacher" was an interested observer of this series of operations.
H. J. MASSINGHAM.
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