Random Reminiscences of Men and Events | Page 8

outlooks, and at the ending was the final burst of
river, hill, cloud, and great sweep of country to crown the whole; and
here I fixed my stakes to show where I suggested that the roads should
run, and finally the exact place where the house should be.
"Look it all over," I said, "and decide which plan is best." It was a
proud moment when this real authority accepted my suggestions as
bringing out the most favoured spots for views and agreed upon the site
of the house. How many miles of roads I have laid out in my time, I can
hardly compute, but I have often kept at it until I was exhausted. While
surveying roads, I have run the lines until darkness made it impossible
to see the little stakes and flags. It is all very vain of me to tell of these
landscape enterprises, but perhaps they will offset the business talks
which occupy so much of my story.
My methods of attending to business matters differed from those of
most well-conducted merchants of my time and allowed me more
freedom. Even after the chief affairs of the Standard Oil Company were
moved to New York, I spent most of my summers at our home in
Cleveland, and I do still. I would come to New York when my presence
seemed necessary, but for the most part I kept in touch with the
business through our own telegraph wires, and was left free to attend to
many things which interested me--among others, the making of paths,
the planting of trees, and the setting out of little forests of seedlings.
Of all the profitable things which develop quickly under the hand, I
have thought my young nurseries show the greatest yield. We keep a
set of account books for each place, and I was amazed not long ago at
the increase in value that a few years make in growing things, when we

came to remove some young trees from Westchester County to
Lakewood, New Jersey. We plant our young trees, especially
evergreens, by the thousand--I think we have put in as many as ten
thousand at once, and let them develop, to be used later in some of our
planting schemes. If we transfer young trees from Pocantico to our
home in Lakewood, we charge one place and credit the other for these
trees at the market rate. We are our own best customers, and we make a
small fortune out of ourselves by selling to our New Jersey place at
$1.50 or $2.00 each, trees which originally cost us only five or ten
cents at Pocantico.
In nursery stock, as in other things, the advantage of doing things on a
large scale reveals itself. The pleasure and satisfaction of saving and
moving large trees--trees, say, from ten to twenty inches in diameter, or
even more in some cases--has been for years a source of great interest.
We build our movers ourselves, and work with our own men, and it is
truly surprising what liberties you can take with trees, if you once learn
how to handle these monsters. We have moved trees ninety feet high,
and many seventy or eighty feet. And they naturally are by no means
young. At one time or another we have tried almost all kinds of trees,
including some which the authorities said could not be moved with
success. Perhaps the most daring experiments were with
horse-chestnuts. We took up large trees, transported them considerable
distances, some of them after they were actually in flower, all at a cost
of twenty dollars per tree, and lost very few. We were so successful that
we became rather reckless, trying experiments out of season, but when
we worked on plans we had already tried, our results were remarkably
satisfactory.
Taking our experiences in many hundreds of trees of various kinds in
and out of season, and including the time when we were learning the art,
our total loss has been something less than 10 per cent., probably more
nearly 6 or 7 per cent. A whole tree-moving campaign in a single
season has been accomplished with a loss of about 3 per cent. I am
willing to admit that in the case of the larger trees the growth has been
retarded perhaps two years, but this is a small matter, for people no
longer young wish to get the effects they desire at once, and the modern

tree-mover does it. We have grouped and arranged clumps of big
spruces to fit the purposes we were aiming for, and sometimes have
completely covered a hillside with them. Oaks we have not been
successful with except when comparatively young, and we don't try to
move oaks and hickories when they have come near to maturity;