At the same time this has preserved, and even enhanced, the place's
wildness, especially the wild flowers and the low-nesting birds.
Sometimes a few yards of retaining-wall, never cemented, always laid up
dry and with a strong inward batter, had to be put in to avoid
smothering the roots of some great tree; for, as everybody knows and
nearly everybody forgets, roots, like fishes, must have air. In one
place, across the filled head of a ravine, the wall, though but a scant
yard high, is fifty feet long, and there is another place where there
should be one like it. In this work no tree was sacrificed save one
noble oak done to death by a youth who knew but forgot that roots must
have air.
Not to make the work expensive it was pursued slowly, through many
successive seasons; yet before even its easy, first half was done the
lawn was in under the grove on an apparently natural, irregular crest
line. Moreover the grove was out on the lawn with an even more natural
haphazard bordering line; for another operation had been carried on
meantime. Trees, souvenir trees, had from time to time been planted on
the lawn by visiting friends. Most of them are set close enough to the
grove to become a part of it, standing in a careful irregularity which
has already obliterated, without molesting, the tree line of the ancient
fence.
[Illustration: "The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the
pushing of the lawn in under the grove was one of the early tasks of My
Own Acre.
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