ich our windows looked out upon,
stood perfectly straight and upright across the sky to the south of them
a row of magnolias (grandiflora) at least sixty feet high, with their
boles, as smooth as the beach, trimmed bare for two-thirds of their
stature. The really decorative marks of the trimming had been so many
years, so many decades, healed as to show that no harm had come of it or
would come. The soaring, dark-green, glittering foliage stood out
against the almost perpetually blue and white sky. Beyond them, a few
yards within the place but not in a straight line, rose even higher a
number of old cedars similarly treated and offering a pleasing contrast
to the magnolias by the feathery texture of their dense sprays and the
very different cast of their lack-lustre green. Overtopping all, on the
farther line of the grounds, southern line, several pecan-trees of
nearly a hundred feet in height, leafless, with a multitude of
broad-spreading boughs all high in air by natural habit, gave an effect
strongly like that of winter elms, though much enlivened by the near
company of the evergreen masses of cedar and magnolia. These made the
upper-air half of the garden, the other half being assembled below. For
the lofty trim of the wintergreen-trees--the beauty of which may have
been learned from the palms--allowed and invited another planting
beneath them. Magnolias, when permitted to branch low, are, to
undergrowth, among the most inhospitable of trees, but in this garden,
where the sunlight and the breezes passed abundantly under such
high-lifted arms and among such clean, bare stems, a congregation of
shrubs, undershrubs and plants of every stature and breadth, arose,
flourished and flowered without stint. Yonder the wind-split,
fathom-long leaves of the banana, brightening the background, arched
upward, drooped again and faintly oscillated to the air's caress. Here
bloomed and smelled the delicate magnolia fuscata, and here, redder with
flowers than green with shining leaves, shone the camellia. Here spread
the dark oleander, the pittosporum and the Chinese privet; and here were
the camphor-tree and the slender sweet olive--we have named them all
before and our steps should not take us over the same ground twice in
one circuit; that would be bad gardening. But there they were, under
those ordinarily so intolerant trees, prospering and singing praises
with them, some in full blossom and perfume, some waiting their turn,
like