tive evergreens. It
comes to us of Pennsylvania all too freely at Christmas time, when the
tree of joy and gifts may mean, in the wholesale, sad forest
destruction. This juniper I have associated particularly with the
dogwood and the red-bud, to the bloom of which it supplies a most
perfect background in the favorite Conewago park, a purely natural
reservation of things beautiful along the Pennsylvania railroad. Its
lead-pencil sister, the red cedar, reaches our literary senses as
closely as does the pulp-making spruce!

I might write much of the rare introduced cypresses from Japan and
China, and of the peculiar variations that have been worked out by the
nurserymen among the native pines and firs; yet this would not be talk
of the trees of the open ground, but rather of the nursery and the park.
Also, if I had but seen them, there would be much to say about the
magnificent conifers of the great West, from the giant red-woods, or
sequoias, of the Mariposa grove in California to the richly varied pines
of the Rockies. But I can only suggest to my readers the intimate
consideration of all this great pine family, so peculiarly valuable to
mankind, and the use of some of the pines and spruces about the home for
the steady cheer of green they so fully provide.

Apples

Well do I remember one of the admonitions of my youth, brought upon me
by an attempt to take apple-blossoms from a tree in bloom because they
were beautiful. I was told that it was wrong to pluck for any purpose
the flowers of fruit trees, because the possible fruitage might thereby
be reduced. That is, feeding the eye was improper, but it was always in
order to conserve all the possibilities for another organ of the body.
In those days we had not learned that nature provides against
contingencies, and that not one-tenth of all the blossoms would be
needed to "set" as much fruit as the tree could possibly mature.

The apple, well called the king of fruits, is worthy of all admiration
as a fruit; but I do not see why that need interfere in the least with
its consideration as an object of beauty. On the contrary, such
consideration is all the better for the apple, which is not only most
desirable and pleasing in its relation to the dessert, the truly
celebrated American pie, the luscious dumpling of the housewife, and the
Italian's fruit-stand of our cities, but is at the same time a
benefaction to the eye and the sense of beauty, in tree, in blosso