This certainly is an isolated event, but out West in a small town in Idaho there has been a curious bit of historical tree planting. The area was settled first (by a gringo) by a pioneer who planted fruit trees to supply miners with fresh fruit. Same fellow was later instrumental in irrigating the desert and the founding of the town around 1900. My course, Canyon Springs, was part of his original ranch and orchards. All of the roads were lined on both sides by Lombardy poplars on the ranch and, much later, poplars lined the major entrance streets to the new town. As you know, poplars are very rapidly growing trees. I’ve seen similar plantings in old photographs and paintings of Euro landscapes.
I have this personal theory that the poplars were planted in such an orderly and uniform fashion to “civilize” as quickly as possible an otherwise desolate desert landscape. In other words, the native landscape of rock and sagebrush was so formidable and uninviting and virtually treeless that it would not cause a favorable impression in the pamphlets circulated back East trying to attract settlers to the region. Trees “said” there are people here—orderly people, who plant trees, gardens, and farms—and, in this arid region at any rate, there is water enough to waste on trees and shade.
It’s quite a stretch to connect my unsupported personal theory to the motivation to plant trees in other regions. However, early photographs of golf courses often show a rather stark, open landscape, more the result clear cut logging and brush clearing rather than a more selective process. Perhaps a contrary process was at work in the great Eastern woodlands of America. Certainly woods were cleared for farms, towns, roads, and the advance of settlement. Meadows and flood plains naturally existed, but were almost certainly covered in vegetation and the random tree. A huge 200-some-acre gash in the forest, not farmed, settled, or put to some familiar purpose, and covered in rather insignificant vegetation such as closely cut grass, may have looked similarly out of place and in need of some “finishing” to the observers of that era.