The region really possesses its own peculiar character and is to be distinguished at first glance from the banks of the usual mountain river with their pine woods and mossy meadows. It has succeeded in retaining this original peculiarity even since it has come into the possession of the real estate company. Even outside the gardens, the aboriginal and original vegetation maintains the upper hand over the imported and the transplanted. It is true that in the avenues and parks the horse-chestnut seems to thrive as well as the swift-growing maple. Even beeches and all kinds of decorative shrubbery—but all these, including the alien poplar which towers and ranges in rows of sterile masculinity—are not native to the soil. I said that the ash was an indigenous tree here—it is to be found everywhere, and it is of all ages—from giants hundreds of years old to the soft shoots which, like so many weeds, sprout in masses from the gravel. It is the ash and its companions, the silver poplar and the aspen, the birch and the willow, both as a tree and a bush, which give distinctive character to this landscape. But these are all trees with small leaves, and this smallness and trimness of the foliage in conjunction with the frequently gigantic masses of the trees themselves, at once attract attention in this neighbourhood. The elm, however, is an exception, and we find it spreading its spacious leaves, fretted as by a jig-saw and shiny and sticky on their upper surface, to the sun. And everywhere there are great masses of creeping plants which weave themselves around the younger trunks in the woods and in a bewildering way entangle their leaves with these. The slender alders form themselves into small groves in the hollows. The lime is scarcely to be met with at all, the oak never appears nor does the fir. Yet there are firs upon the eastern declivities which form the frontiers of our territory, for here the soil changes and with it the vegetation. There they rear black against the heavens and peer, sentinel-like, upon us in our lower levels.