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.
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