Despoiling The Landscape

Some Caustic Criticisms on Tree Trimming by an Expert Critic Who Tells How Ann Arbor May Be Easily Beautiful.

A few weeks a go a landscape architect spent a day in Ann Arbor. The things he saw and told a reporter will interest good citizens who would like to see the city made beautiful and attractive without unnecessary outlay.

In the first place he said that nature has done a good deal for Ann Arbor and we [ought] not go to the trouble and expense of leveling every hill and filling every valley; we shall have a far prettier picture in the end by simply taking advantage of the natural lay of the land. Even that briar-covered, burdock patch north of the Michigan Central station will look a good deal better when it is reclaimed, if instead of spending hundreds of dollars hauling in earth, it is simply planted at its present level with dogwood, eider, ivy and other native shrubs and vines right out of our own woods. There will be a natural beauty about it then that will never be realized if the ground is filled up, leveled off, plotted into conventional designs, and planted with exotics.

Felch Park was next visited and when he saw the hopelessly mutilated stumps of what were once shapely trees his comments were brief and to the point. In substance he said that such a ruthless, destructive method of trimming - the same as that perpetrated on the campus - is never admirable, and that many of the trees are now in such bad shape that nothing can be done to save them, unless possibly a few might be induced to throw up space by cutting them close to the ground. They all show in a frightful way "how not to do it."

Down beyond Lawrence's Woods, looking up the river from the bridge near the boulevard, he pointed out the graceful dip of the branches of trees that have escaped one zeal for improvement. Here is a rare bit of natural landscape, thus far unspoiled.

Look at it some day long enough to feel the charm of the feathery spray, tapering into lines of exquisite beauty between sky and water, and then if your homeward walk leads through Felsh Park or the campus say your prayers and try to keep from swearing.

Wouldn't it be a good thing for the Civic Improvement Society, or the university, or some political citizen, to invite a man blessed with a bit of common sense to come here and tell us a few things about parks and trimming trees, and the like? If ground is better for a park without filling up, and trees are better without being trimmed to death, why not save the money these things cost and use it in really beautifying the city.

A Spectator