R., (Hartford, Ct.) First give the soil a heavy dressing of stable manure and ashes - then trench it two spades deep. Plant your trees in good composted soil, and mulch them with three inches of tan-bark - after the ground has settled over the roots. In your light soil we would never stir or dig the ground at all, over the roots of fruit trees. But every other autumn we would remove the mulching - give a top-dressing of decomposed manure and ashes, and replace the tan again upon the top - keeping it there summer and winter - by renewing it as often as necessary. Nothing is so injurious to fruit trees in light soils, as to be constantly stirring the soil, and breaking the young fibres.

Whatever is rare, and difficult to be obtained. A remarkable illustration of the truth of this, may be found in the ornamental gardening of this country, which is noted for the strongly marked features made in its artificial scenery by certain poorer sorts of foreign trees, as well as the almost total neglect of finer native materials, that are indigenous to the soil. We will undertake to say, for example, that almost one-half of all the deciduous trees that have been set in ornamental plantations of the last ten years, have been composed, for the most part, of two very indifferent foreign trees - the Ailantus and the Silver Poplar. When we say indifferent, we do not mean to say that such trees as the Ailantus and the Silver Poplar, are not valuable trees in their way - that is, that they are rapid growing, will thrive in all soils, and are transplanted with the greatest facility - suiting at once both the money-making grower and the ignorant planter - but we do say, that when such trees as the American Elms, Maples and Oaks, can be raised with so little trouble - trees as full of grace, dignity, and beauty, as any that grow in any part of the world - trees, too, that go on gathering new beauty with age, instead of throwing up suckers that utterly spoil lawns, or that become, after the first few years, only a more intolerbable nuisance every day - it is time to protest against the indiscriminate use of such sylvan materials - no matter how much of "heavenly origin," or "silvery" foliage, they may have in their well sounding names.

It is by no means the fault of the nurserymen, that their nurseries abound in ailan-tuses and poplars, while so many of our fine forest trees are hardly to be found. The nurserymen are bound to pursue their business so as to make it profitable, and if people ignore oaks and ashes, and adore poplars and ailantuses, nurserymen cannot be expected to starve because the planting public generally are destitute of taste.

What the planting public need is to have their attention called to the study of nature - to be made to understand that it is in our beautiful woodland slopes, with their undulating outlines, our broad river meadows studded with single trees and groups allowed to grow and expand quite in a state of free and graceful development, our steep hills, sprinkled with picturesque pines and firs, and our deep valleys, dark with hemlocks and cedars, that the real lessons in the beautiful and picturesque are to be taken, which will lead us to the appreciation of the finest elements of beauty in the embellishment of our country places - instead of this miserable rage for "trees of heaven" and other fashionable tastes of the like nature. There are, for example, to be found along side of almost every sequestered lawn by the road-side in the northern states, three trees that are strikingly remarkable for beauty of foliage, growth or or flower, viz: the Tulip tree, the Sassafras, and the Pepperidge. The first is, for stately elegance, almost unrivalled among forest trees: the second, when planted in cultivated soil and allowed a fair chance, is more beautiful in its diversified laurel-like foliage than almost any foreign tree in our pleasure grounds: and the last is not surpassed by the orange or the bay in its glossy leaves, deep green as an emerald in summer, and rich red as a ruby in autumn - and all of them freer from the attacks of inand holding their foliage through all the season like native-born Americans, when foreigners shrivel and die; and vet we could name a dozen nurseries where there is a large collection of ornamental trees of foreign growth, hut neither a sassafras, nor a pepperidge, nor perhaps a tulip tree could be had for love or money.

There is a large spirit of inquiry and a lively interest in rural taste, awakened on every side of us, at the present time, from Maine to the valley of the Mississippi - but the great mistake made by most novices is that they study gardens too much, and nature too little. Now gardens, in general, are stiff and graceless, except just so far as nature, ever free and flowing, re-asserts her rights, in spite of man's want of taste, or helps him when he has endeavored to work in her own spirit. But the fields and woods are full of instruction, and in such features of our richest and most smiling and diversified country must the best hints for the embellishment of rural homes always be derived. And yet it is not any portion of the woods and fields that we wish our finest pleasure-ground scenery precisely to resemble. We rather wish to select from the finest sylvan features of nature, and to recompose the materials in a choicer manner - by rejecting anything foreign to the spirit of elegance and refinement which should characterize the landscape of the most tasteful country residence - a landscape in which all that is graceful and beautiful in nature is preserved - all her most perfect forms and most harmonious lines - but with that added refinement which high keeping and continual care, confer on natural beauty without impairing its innate spirit of freedom, or the truth and freshness of its intrinsic character.

A planted elm of fifty years, which stands in the midst of the smooth lawn before yonder mansion - its long graceful branches towering upwards like an antique classical vase, and then sweeping to the ground with a curve as beautiful as the falling spray of a fountain, has all the freedom of character of its best prototypes in the wild woods, with a refinement and a perfection of symmetry which it would be next to impossible to find in a wild tree. Let us take it then as the type of all true art in landscape gardening - which selects from natural materials that abound in any country, its best sylvan features, and by giving them a better opportunity than they could otherwise obtain, brings about a higher beauty of development and a more perfect expression than nature itself offers. Study landscape in nature more, and the gardens and their catalogues less. - is our advice to the rising generation of planters, who wish to embellish their places in the best and purest taste.