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THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
Apollo me inform*d, and did inspire My Soul with his divine, prophetic Fire : And I, the Priest of Plants, their Sense expound ; Hear, 0 ye Worlds, and listen all around.
Cowley.
WEEPING WYCH ELM
The New Book of Trees
BY
MARCUS WOODWARD
Author of " Country Contentments" etc.
Illustrated with Wood Engravings by C. DILLON McGURK
He spake of trees from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that spririgeth
out oj the wall.
LONDON: A. M. PHILPOT LIMITED 69 Great Russell Street, W.C.I
With regard to the Woods of the Forest, which were originally
considered only as they respected Game, the First Officer, under the
Lord-Warden, is the Woodward. It is his business, as his title denotes,
to inspect the Woods.
William Gilpin.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
PREFACE
This book is written with a certain sympathy for a saying of ** The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table ** : —
** Now, if you expect me to hold forth in a ' scientific * way about my tree-loves — to talk, for instance, of the Ulmus Americana t and describe the ciliated edges of its samara, and all that ... I must refer you to a dull friend who will discourse to you on such matters. What tree-lovers want is the meaning, the character, the expression of a tree, as a kind and as an individual."
A glowing passage of Ruskin comes to mind. He saw trees as pilgrims; hiding from winds, reaching to sunshine, crowding to drink at the stream-side, climbing to heavenward ridges, opening in dance round mossy knolls, or gathering to rest in the fields.
The ancients were mindful of the Dryads ; and to this day, in an oak-wood, one could think of the oaks as abodes of spirits, for each one in an old wood may have its marked character.
I have tried to bring out the character and expressions of trees, and to glean the folklore that has gathered about them all, from *' The builder oak and eke the hardy ash " — the pillar elm, the sailing fir, the shooter yew — to the humble wayside shrubs, like the Wayfaring Tree, perhaps so named because it is a true pilgrim among trees, haunting the Pilgrim s Way.
MARCUS WOODWARD.
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2010 with funding from
University of British Columbia Library
http://www.archive.org/details/newbookoftreesOOwood
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface 5
Remarks on Forest Scenery II
WOODLAND TREES
Oak 29
Beech 60
Ash 71
Sweet Chestnut 79
Birches 85
Rowan 92
HEDGEROW TREES
Elms 99
Poplars Ill
Sycamore and Maple 120
Hornbeam 129
SMALL HEDGEROW TREES OR SHRUBS
Hazel 135
Spindle Tree 145
Buckthorns 147
Wild Cherries 149
Sloe AND Plum 154
Apple and Pear 158
White Beam AND Service Tree 162
Hawthorn 164
Dogwood 171
Common Elder 173
Wayfaring Tree 177
7
8 CONTENTS
SMALL HEDGEROW TREES OR SHRUBS-contlnued
PAGE
Guelder Rose ^80
Privet 183
PARK AND GARDEN TREES
Lime Tree 187
Walnut 194
Horse Chestnut 199
Holly 205
Laburnum 209
Locust Tree 212
Strawberry Tree 216
Lilac 218
Mulberry • 220
Box 225
Tulip Tree 230
CONIFEROUS TREES
Scots Pine 235
Austrian Pine 240
Pinaster 240
Stone Pine 241
Weymouth Pine 243
Larch 244
Cedar 248
Silver Fir 253
Common Spruce 254
Douglas Fir 256
Wellingtonia 258
MoNKEY-PuZZLE 259
Lawson's Cypress 261
Cypress 261
Arbor Vn/E ... 261
Juniper 264
CONTENTS 9 CONIFEROUS TREES-continued
PAGE
Common Yew 267
Maidenhair Tree 285
LONDON, SEA-SIDE AND RIVER-SIDE TREES
Planes 291
Tamarisk 295
Alder 297
Willows 301
Bibliographical Note 310
NOTE, — No attempt has been made to group the trees according to any systematic tahle^ as they belong to such diverse families ; a table of trees may be likened to a network* having so many meshes torn oat that it hardly hangs together. The trees have been roughly grouped as belonging to Woodland and Hedgerow^ Park and Garden^ the Sea-sidt or the River-side.
i
i
REMARKS ON FOREST SCENERY AND FOREST BOOKS
■III
'tv^- .
And foorth they passe with pleasure forward led, Joying to heare the birdes' sweet harmony. Which therein shrouded from the tempests dred. Seemed in their song to scorne the cruell sky. Much can they praise the trees so straight and hy. The sayling pine, the cedar proud and tall, The vine-propp elm, the poplar never dry, The builder oake, sole king of forrests all. The aspine good for staves, the cypresse funerall.
Spenser.
In the twelfth book of PHny, where he enters at large on the subject of trees and forests, he exalts them cis the most valuable presents conferred by Nature upon mankind. It was from the forest, it is written, that man drew his first aliment ; the leaves of the trees made the bed in his cave, their bark gave him clothing. This was, as Pope wrote :
Ere the base laws of servitude began. When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
The woods have a power over man, which they have never wholly lost. As a witty Frenchman said, " When civilized men take up their abode in forests, they relapse into a state of semi-barbarism."
Time was, when vast forests of oak covered most of Britain, of which fragments remain from the days of Caractacus and Boadicea. Caesar describes the ancient Britons as true forest people : '* A town among the Britons," said he, with quiet contempt, ** is nothing
n
12 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
more than a thick wood fortified with a ditch and rampart, to serve as a place of retreat against incursions of their enemies/*
In those days, the forests also were devoted to religious services. The Druids practised their rites in secret groves, and Caesar tells how men were offered in sacrifice in baskets of osier-twigs ; according to some writers, the Druids took their name from the oak, in old British or Celtic, derw. Pliny described their ceremonies in cutting the sacred mistletoe from the oak with golden pruning-knives. The Druids were cruel, though idealists, teaching the immortality of the soul. Their chief seat was in Mona, the Island of Anglesea, sometimes called the ** Shady Island *' from its religious groves, their last stronghold whence they were driven by the Romans. It is still, as of old, the Shady Island. The Druids have gone and the Roman Empire : ** Generation after generation passeth away ; but the earth endureth for ever.**
The Romans were not mighty hunters ; the Saxons, when they came, proved they had been hunters from the cradle, and it was their greatest pleasure to chcise the wild boar and deer through our forests primaeval. The Saxon noble had his hall in the forest ; here, with his billmen and his bowmen, his hunters, his ** born thralls,** and his swineherds, he spent his days in the chase, his evenings in mirth and song, led by some wandering minstrel. Other mansions arose in the forests. The clergy, about the time of the Norman invasion, possessed nearly one- third of the country, and by shady woodland spots, by the silvery rivers, set up their religious houses. The Norman Kings increased the forests, and in their tyrannical way enclosed at will any tract they pleased.
Long after the Conquest, the oak dominated the land. It seems that in Henry II's day the great part of England was woodland, mainly of oak. London was then set about by forest : * In the coverts whereof," said FitzStephen, a monk of Canterbury of those days, ** lurked bucks and does, wild boars, and bulls. So
REMARKS ON FOREST SCENERY 13
late as the reign of Henry VII, forests covered nearly one- third of all England, as related in this passage (in Latin) of Polydore Virgil : *' Almost the third part of England is uncultivated, and possessed only by stags, deer, or wild- goats ; which last are found chiefly in the Northern parts. Rabbits too abound everywhere. You every- where meet with vast forests, where these wild-beasts range at large ; or with parks secured by pales. Hunting is the principal amusement of all the people of distinction." The oak-woods endured until the days of Henry VIII, and until his time there does not seem to have been much uneasiness about the future of the timber supplies. We may note that the first book in English dealing with the cultivation of trees was John Fitzherbert's ** Book of Husbandry," written in 1523, a book which he advised every young gentleman who intended to thrive ** to rede it frome the begynnynge to the endynge, whereby he may perceyve the chap tyres and contentes in the same, and by reason of ofte redynge he may waxe perfyte what sholde be done at all seasons." A statute of Henry VI I Is reign enjoined the ** replanta- tion of forest trees to cure the spoils and devastations that have been made in the woods. In Scotland, about the same time, in the reign of James V, the planting of woods was encouraged. In the opening days of the sixteenth century it had been enacted that as ** the wood of Scotland was utterly destroyed," a penalty of five pounds should be incurred for felling or burning green wood. Every lord and landholder was ordered to plant an acre of wood, unless owning great woods or forests on his land. But wars played havoc with all the woodlands, as is shown by the thousands of place-names on the maps of Scotland, derived from woods no more to be seen. The old song of the ** Outlaw Murray " ran,
Ettrick forest is a fair forest. In it grows many a semelie trie ; The hart, the hynd, the doe, the roe. And of a* beastes great plentie.
What remains of those seemly trees now ?
14 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
Shortly after Fitzherbert's book, fears respecting a scarcity of oak timber were expressed again by the author of one of the most remarkable books m the English language, Thomas Tusser, who wrote of farming in homely verse, m his work. Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry. * Writing about 1562, he complained that *' men were more studious to cut down than to plant. ' This is a sample of the good advice he gave his fellow landowners :
Sow acorns, ye owners that timber do love ; Sow hay and rie with them, the better to prove : If cattle or coney may enter the crop. Young oak is in danger of losing his top.
At the close of the sixteenth century was published Manwood's *' Laws of the Forest,'* tracing in detail the gradual evolution of those insupportable enactions that until the reign of Henry III made the killing of a stag, or royal beast, a crime to be punished with penalties as great as those for taking a human life. The penalty to a bondman was that he ** lost his skinne *' ; a freeman his liberty. We may pause to note here Manwood's legal definition of a forest as it ran from pre-Norman days to the time of Charles II :
** A certen territorie of wooddy grounds and fruitful! pastures, priviledged for wild beastts and foules of Forest Chase and Warren to rest and abide in, in the safe protection of the King, for his princely delight and pleasure, which territorie of ground, so priviledged, is meered and bounded with irremoueable markes, meres, and boundaries."
The right of hunting was thus reserved exclusively to the King ; the Conqueror claimed all the wild animals, wherever they might be.
Manwood lamented that *' the slender and negligent execution of the forest law hath been the decay and destruction (in almost all places within this realm) of great wood and timber ; the want whereof, as well in this present time as in time to come, shall appear in the navy of this realm."
REMARKS ON FOREST SCENERY 15
The next landmark book appeared in 1 61 1 , when Arthur Standish published his celebrated *' Commons' Com- plaint," wherein he aired the special grievance of the generall destruction and waste of woods in this kingdome, with a remedy for the same ; also, how to plant wood according to the nature of any soyle." This work mightily pleased King James, and there was appended to it a kind of mandate ** By the King, to all noblemen, and other our loving subjects to whom it may appertain,'* arguing that whereas Arthur Standish, gentleman, had taken much pains in composing his projects for increasing woods, it would much content the King that his projects should be put to the test ; and the King was pleased to give allowance to the book, and the printing thereof.
In the same reign was published, 1621, "An Olde Thrift Newly Revived ; wherein is declared the manner of planting, preserving, and husbanding young trees of divers Kindes for Timber and Fuell ; and of sowing Acornes, Chestnuts, Beech-mast, the Seedes of Elmes, Ashen-keyes, &c."
The needs of Charles I induced him to make ruinous grants of royal woods to whomsoever would give him money ; in the civil wars many forests were nearly destroyed. A small attempt was made at re-afforesta- tion by Charles II, in an order issued under the King's sign manual to Sir John Norton, the Woodward of the New Forest, to enclose three hundred acres of waste as a nursery for young oak — this in 1669.
The early forest records are now preserved, in vast quantities, at the Public Record Office, and may be studied in Turner's ** Select Pleas of the Forest," or in a more popular work by Dr. Cox, '* The Royal Forests of England " (1905). An excellent short account of the forest laws is given in Dr. John Nisbet's ** Our Forests and Woodlands," in the Haddon Hall Library, also in Houghton Townley's ** English Woodlands."
From these accounts we gather that in Anglo-Saxon times a chief use of the forests was for the pannage of pigs ; by King Ina's laws, A.D. 690, the value of a tree
16 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
was reckoned by the number of swine that could shelter beneath it, while in Domesday Book land would be described as ** wood of so many pigs/* The Conqueror saw to it that the forests should be regarded rather as royal hunting grounds — silva regis. The King could hunt anywhere by virtue of a forgery of a suppositious charter known as " Charta Canuti,*' supposed to have been granted at a Parliament at Winchester in A.D. 1016. No new laws were enacted until the forest charters of the early days of Henry III, which wiped away the death-penalty for taking the King^sdeer.
** The Eyre '* was the forest Court ; the judges held roving commissions, so the Court's name was derived from the old French, Erre, '* to go.'* Their office was of great dignity, and they were peers of the realm ; the rich harvest of fines they garnered, for such offences as encroachments, went to the Crown. Charles I cast back covetous eyes on the monstrous fines of the old days, and foolishly attempted to revive the almost extinct courts.
Among the chief officers of the forests were Stewards and Verderers, who were directly responsible to the Crown, and it was their duty to attend the Swainmotes, or local courts, where the Verderers acted as judges, assisted by their technical advisers, the Stewards. The Verderers' symbol of office weis an axe. The Foresters were in charge of the venison and vert — " greenhue," or greenwood — in their respective bailiwicks. The symbol was a hunting horn, but a Royal or Chief Forester's symbol was a bow. The Regarders were Knights who supervised the work of the Foresters, and made reports on the forests, surveying and drawing out schedules, with the assistance of Foresters and Woodwards. Woodwards had the timber and underwood particularly in their charge, but were responsible also for the venison : their symbol was a small hatchet or billhook ; if called to a Justice Seat, the Woodward would present his hatchet to the Justice in Eyre. Agisters (from agito, ** to drive "
REMARKS ON FOREST SCENERY 17
or ** feed **) were officers in charge of beasts at pasturage, collecting the money for the ** agistment," or feeding, of cattle and pigs.
The term, ' Beasts of the Forest,** referred particularly to red deer, fallow deer, roe, and wild boar, all preserved. ** Fowls of the Forest ** was a term properly allied to the swan, and swan-herding was part of the duties of some foresters ; the game-birds were " Fowls of Warren,** the term warren signifying the right, given by royal grants, of hunting certain animals : it was an offence to hunt a hare into warrenable land. ** Beasts of Venery " were the red deer, wolf, wild boar, and hare. These were the native wild inhabitants, called ** sylvestres," while others like fox and martin were ** campestres,** haunting open country by day.
** Swainmote,** the local courts for the administration of the laws, were expected to meet every forty-two days, and were known as the Forty-Day Courts, presided over, as mentioned, by the Verderers and the Steward, the Foresters and Woodmen presenting offenders ; fines were imposed, but offenders usually were released on bail until the next Eyre was held. The jury was made up of *' Swains,** or freeholders. At this court the cases were prepared for the Justice Seat, or Court of the Chief Justice in Eyre, supposed to be held once in so many years, though the intervals might extend in practice to thirty years or more. At the Justice Seat, inhabitants of the forest, being twelve years of age, took their oath of allegiance in the terms of the ancient rhyme :
You shall true Liege-man be,
Unto the King's Majestie :
Unto the Beasts of the Forest you shall no hurt do.
Nor to anything that doth belong thereto :
The Offences of others you shall not conceal.
But, to the utmost of your Power, you shall them revea
Unto the Officers of the Forest,
Or to them who may see them redrest :
All these things you shall see done.
So help you God at his Holy Doom.
To return to the story of the trees, we must note the publication of a classical work in 1629, John Parkinson *s
B
18 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
Paradlsi in Sole, Paradisus Terrestris," and come to the work of the father of British forestry, John Evelyn.
By the time of the Restoration, oak for the King s navy was growing scarce. An appeal was made to the newly-formed Royal Society to find a wise man to discourse on the profits and pleasures of growing timber, and the lot fell on John Evelyn, younger son of the Squire of Wotton, in Surrey. He brought to his task learning and vast enthusiasm, besides a ** pretty wit," and in the year 1662 delighted the Royal Society by reading his *' Sylva ; or, a Discourse of Forest Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in His Majestie's Dominions,'* a classic of forestry. One object of the book was to mend the havoc wrought on the woodlands by the Civil War ; as Evelyn put it, there was nothing which seemed more fatally to threaten a weakening, if not a dissolution, of the nation *s strength, than the notorious decay of her wooden walls : ** For,'* he said,
it has not been the late increase of shipping alone, the multiplication of glass-works, iron-furnaces, and the like, from whence this impolitic diminution of our timber has proceeded ; but from the disproportionate spreading of tillage, caused through that prodigious havoc made by such as lately professing themselves against Root and Branch were tempted not only to fell and cut down, but utterly to extirpate, demolish, and raze, as it were, all those many goodly woods and forests, which our more prudent ancestors left standing for the ornament and service of their country. And,*' he added, ** this devastation is now become so epidemical, that unless some favourable expedient offer itself, one of the most glorious and considerable bulwarks of this nation will, within a short time, be totally wanting to it.
So the word went forth, that wastes should be planted with timber trees, especially the oak : as Mason sang, to,
Nourish there TTiose sapling oaks, which at Britannia's call. May heave their trunks mature into the main. And float the bulwarks of her liberty.
REMARKS ON FOREST SCENERY 19
Evelyn's book is still a book to read and to enjoy, though no doubt much of the practical forestry he advocates is on a level with the practical advice on angling given by Izaak Walton. Evelyn, for all his deep know- ledge of trees, and his great experiments in raising and planting trees, was remarkably credulous, relying much on ** what Pliny saith '* for the matter of his book, and exploring all kinds of fabulous tree-lore.
The notion of the Arcadians, that divers of them were metamorphosed into trees, and again out of trees into men, is discussed by Evelyn, who remarks, ** Which perhaps they fancied, by seeing men creep sometimes out of their cavities, in which they often lodged and secured themselves.** He told how the ancient poets lovingly dwelt on the idea that every great tree included a certain tutelar Genius or Nymph living and dying with it :
An aged Oak beside him cleft and rent, And from his fertile hollow womb forth went i (Clad in rare weeds, and strange habiliment)
A full-grown Nymph.
Evelyn played with the fancy, and confessed, ** In the meanwhile, as the fall of a very aged oak, giving a crack like thunder, has been often heard at many miles distant, constrained though I often am to fell them with reluctancy, I do not at any time remember to have heard the groans of those nymphs (grieving to be dis- possessed of their antient habitations) without some emotion and pity.** He tells of strange disasters which have befallen those who felled goodly trees ; of one who, giving the first stroke of the axe with his own hand, killed his own father (an uncautious Knight) by the fall of the tree. He tells of trees that groan uncannily, through the inclusion of air in their cavities, suggesting that something of the kind gave occasion of the fabulous Dodonean Oracle. Dismal groans from the forest he heard in truth in the November of 1703, when a dread storm laid the forest oaks low, like whole regiments fallen in battle ; three thousand in the Forest of Dean, four thousand in the New Forest ; himself losing so
20 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
many that his home, Wotton, was no longer Wotton, or Wood-town. And this brmgs him to discuss the revenge the oak will take on those who presume to cut the sacred mistletoe in an impious way, not as the Druids cut it, with a golden axe, praying a blessing the while, and after- wards sacrificing two white bulls. There were two men, ** sacrilegious usurpers,** who cut the mistletoe, for an apothecary of London, from a goodly tree at Norwood, called ** the Vicar *s Oak,** and felled the tree : ** The first soon after lost his eye, and the other broke his leg, as if the Hamadryads had revenged the indignity."
As the seventeenth century gave birth to Evelyn's classic work, the eighteenth was to be adorned by the publication of Gilbert White s ** Natural History of Selborne,*' and two years before his death another notable book on forestry was to see the light, by William Gilpin, Vicar of Boldre, in the New Forest ; after ten years of labour he produced, in 1791, his classic ** Remarks on Forest Scenery,** a work now set on the same shelf cis Izaak Walton*s ** Compleat Angler.** Old Izaak is read rather for the quiet charm of his writing than for his practical advice, for such sentences as, ** III tell you, scholar ; when I sat last on this primrose bank, and looked down these meadows, I thought of them — * They were too pleasant to be looked upon, but only on holy-days.* ** So with Gilpin's observations ; we may question his taste, when he derides the horse- chestnut, and finds no beauty in a beech-wood in October ; yet we linger over such a passage as where he describes the humble offices of the willow, that weeps beside some romantic footpath bridge, or some glassy pool, over which it hangs its streaming foliage :
And dips Its pendent boughs, stooping as if to drink.
He brought to his subject the same enthusiasm as had Evelyn : ** It is no exaggerated praise,** he wrote, ** to call a tree the grandest and most beautiful of all the productions of the earth.*'
REMARKS ON FOREST SCENERY 21
Gilpin's book opens with a pleasant discourse on the features which make up the beauty and the grandeur of trees, and these he finds to be threefold : Form, lightness, and a proper balance, remarking that a tree may have form, and may have lightness, yet lose all effect by wanting a proper poise. ** The bole must appear to support the branches. We do not desire to see it supporting its burden with the perpendicular firmness of a column. An easy sweep is always agreeable ; but at the same time it should not be such a sweep, as discovers one side plainly overbalanced,'* and so on.
Next, he discusses the adventitious things which aid beauty (comparable to my lady's patch), the green velvet moss on the beech, the yellow lichens on an oak, the ivy that decks the furrowed bark, the honeysuckle that makes a fragrant chaplet to the hoary head : and dwells fondly on the picturesqueness of the withered top, the hollow trunk, the dead arm, and the blasted tree ; and tells of one who, for effect's sake, was hardy enough even to plant a withered tree, (Like John Evelyn, he liked to call to the aid of his descriptions all the resources of italics.) The rooting also of trees he found to be a circumstance on which their beauty depends :
** I know not, whether it is reckoned among the maladies of a tree, to heave his root above the soil. Old trees generally do. It is certainly very picturesque. The more they raise the ground around them, and the greater number of radical knobs they heave up, the firmer they seem to establish their footing upon the earth ; and the more dignity they assume."
High among the adventitious beauties is the trees susceptibility of motion ; as the poet remarked, ** Things in motion sooner catch the eye, than what stirs not " :
** From the motion of the tree, we have also the pleasing circumstance of the chequered shade, formed under it by the dancing of the sun-beams among it's playing leaves. This circumstance, tho not so much calculated for picturesque use, (as it's beauty arises chiefly from it's motion) is yet very amusing in nature." And he quotes :
22 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
The chequered earth seems restless as a flood Brushed by the winds. So sportive is the light Shot through the boughs ; it dances, as they dance. Shadow, and sunshine intermingling quick, And dark'ning, and enlightening, as the leaves Play wanton.
Now and again the old writer attacks the appearance of certain trees in a hbellous manner. He was strangely displeased with the beech. ** Its skeleton/* he says, ** is very deficient ; the branches are fantastically wreathed, and disproportioned, twining awkwardly among each other. In full leaf it is equally unpleasing ; it has the appearance of an overgrown bush; what light- ness it has," he went on, warming in attack, ** disgusts, and on the whole, the luxuriant beech is a displeasmg tree.'* Even its Autumnal tones found but grudging favour, and were condemned as too monotonous. ** The eye is generally fatigued with one deep monotony of orange." As to the horse-chestnut, that is roundly condemned as a heavy, disagreeable tree, and when in full flower as a glaring object, unharmonious and un- picturesque.
He is at his best in describing various types of forest scenery, the copse and the glens wherein the lady-fern delights, with clear forest streams, where lights and shadows dance on the green turf :
Where the copse-wood is the greenest, Where the fountain glistens sheenest. Where the morning dew lies longest, There the lady-fern grows strongest.
First, the Copse, forest trees intermixed with brush- wood which is periodically cut down : "It is among the luxuries of nature, to retreat into the cool recesses of the full-grown copse from the severity of a meridian sun ; and to be serenaded by the humming insects of the shade ; whose continuous song has a more refreshing sound, than the buzzing vagrant fly, which wantons in the glare of day ; and, as Milton expresses it, * winds her sultry horn.* ** Next, the Glen, a narrow chasm between hills, with wooded banks, a rivulet at the bottom, foaming over rocks or murmuring among pebbles, with glades
REMARKS ON FOREST SCENERY 23
leading away : ** The eye is carried down, from the higher grounds, to a sweep of the river — or to a Httle gushing cascade — or to the face of a fractured rock, garnished with hanging wood — or perhaps to a cottage, with its scanty area of lawn falling to the river, on one side ; and sheltered by a clump of oaks on the other ; while the smoke wreathing behmd the trees disperses, and loses itself, as it gains the summit of the glen" Next we pass to the open Grove, probably of pines on a moorland : here *' a walk, upon a velvet turf, winding at pleasure among these natural columns, whose twisting branches at least admit some variety, with a spreading canopy of foliage over the head, is pleasing ; and in hot weather, refreshing."
Groves were planted to console at noon The pensive wanderer In their shades. At eve The moon-beam, sHding softly in between The sleeping leaves, is all the light he wants For meditation.
And so to the Forest, whose distinction is grandeur and dignity, whose effect is to rouse the imagination, with trees of all ages and sizes, growing in wild disorder, as the root casually runs to throw up a scion, as the acorn chances to fall in a mossy bed : ** those goodly green, and pleasant woods, the sight and beholding whereof is so comely and delightful,**
This phrase is from a source whence it would be least expected — a law-book : Manwood s *' Laws of the Forest," first published in 1598, wherein he remarks on the three special causes why the forest-laws provided for the preservation of the vert ; the first, for cover for deer, the second, for acorns and mast, which feed the deer, and the third, *' Propter decorem, for the comeliness and beauty of the same in a forest. For the very sight, and beholding of the goodly green, and pleasant woods in a forest, is no less pleasant, and delightful in the eye of a prince, than the view of the wild beasts of chase ; and therefore the grace of a forest is to be decked and trimmed up with store of pleasant green coverts."
24 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
The nineteenth century saw the arrival of a prodigious crop of tree-books; notable among the early ones, J. G. Strutt's ** Sylva Bntannica,'* describing all the most famous trees of the land, and Sir T. Dick Lauder *s edition of Gilpins book, 1834. A little later was published the ** Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum,** by J. C. Loudon, in eight volumes, illustrated by above two thousand five hundred engravings : also his ** Encyclo- paedia of Trees.** To the ** Arboretum,** a perfect mine of information on the folklore, the poetry, and the legends of trees, as well as of their botany, their culture, and of their uses in the arts, nearly every subsequent writer seems to have been indebted; the present writer makes grateful acknowledgment for information gleaned from this great work.
The year 1842 brought John Selby's " History of British Forest-Trees,** with charming and delicate illustrations. In I860 came one of the first of the popular books to survive the mid- Victorian era, the Rev. C. A. Johns's ** Forest Trees of Great Britain," gathering up a rich harvest of lore from earlier writers and travellers. The mantle of Strutt fell on the shoulders of two indefatigable students of trees, Mr. H. J. Elwes and Dr. Augustine Henry, whose work, ** Trees of Great Britain and Ireland,** was the outcome of many years of labour in examining trees in all four Continents, and watching the fates of different species introduced to this clime. A remarkable statement made by these authors may be quoted to bring this brief survey to a close :
*' After having seen the trees of every country in Europe, of nearly all the States of North America, of Canada, Japan, China, West Siberia and Chile, we confidently assert that these islands contain a greater number of fine trees from the temperate regions of the world than any other country.**
To most of these writers the present writer is much indebted for fancies, fables and facts re- told in this book ; and, in the words of John Evelyn's first editor, ** Makes
REMARKS ON FOREST SCENERY 25
this public acknowledgement to avoid the charge of plagiarism/' This is a book of ** corn from old fieldes/* a harvest of thoughts culled from the famous vs^riters, from the days when men deified trees — alike because of the sanctity they seemed to acquire by age, and because of their manifold services — ** which haply/* a philosopher has remarked, ** had been taught them by the gods/*
WOODLAND TREES
OAKS
Common Oak (Quercus Rohm),
Our common oak, most renowned of all oaks in fable and history, is the largest of British trees, rising in height from 60 even to 150 feet, and attaining a girth more remarkable than the height, from 10 to 50 feet, even to above 70 feet, according to the waist-measurement of a giant of Yorkshire.
From the gnarled, furrowed, massive trunk, enormous, tortuous boughs are thrown out, with short branches which may produce a low, but ample rounded, spreading crown. A peculiar feature is the arrangement of the buds and their mode of development, pro- ducing the characteristic zig-zag growth, which, in the days of '* wooden walls," made the oak's boughs so valuable in ship-building, allowing ** knees " to be cut at various angles ; the tortuous form adds greatly to the picturesque outline of the tree in Winter. The buds are mostly crowded at the ends of the twigs, and increase in length is commonly due to the acti\ity of lateral, and not of terminal buds.
The broad leaves are of wavy outline, with rounded lobes, of a yellowish hue in Spring — (hence the happy description of an oak as a *' primrose mountain ") — turning to dark green in Mid-Summer, and to a warm brown in October.
The flowers appear in April and May. The male flowers are in short catkins, often breaking out from buds of the previous year, and in tufts ; the individual flowers are spaced along the axis of the catkin, yellowish green, with about six floral leaves, and four to twelve stamens. The female flowers appear in groups of one to five, on twigs of the current year ; each flower consists of a three-celled ovary surrounded by a scaly soft cupule, which becomes the cup of the acorn.
The growth is marvellously slow. Acorns are not produced until about the seventieth year, and if large timber is needed a tree is not felled until after its hundredth year. For some two hundred years the tree will make wood without decaying, and it may live for a thousand years.
There are two distinct varieties of the oak, as Linnaeus recognized above a hundred and fifty years ago : the sessile-flowered oak, some-
29
30 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
times called durmast {Quercus Robur, var. sessiliflora) and the pedun- culate oak (Q. Robur, var. pedunculata.) The durmast bears flowers without footstalks, the acorns sitting close to the shoots, and the leaves are carried on stalks ; this variety is best known in the North and West, and in Ireland, and in the Forest of Dean, while there are some old examples in the Forest of Arden. In the pedunculate oak the characteristic features of the durmast are reversed ; the flowers and acorns are borne on long stalks, and the leaf-stalks are short or absent. This oak is most abundant in southern, eastern and midland counties. At beautiful Knole, Sevenoaks, an avenue of the durmast oaks may be compared to the other trees. It will be found that the stems and branches of the durmast are the stralghter, the pedunculate oak having a more branching growth, a more twisted and gnarled look, and a more rugged bark. A pocket lens reveals another difference ; the back of the leaf of a pedunculate oak is smooth ; that of the durmast has some fine down. Some would judge the sessile oak, as it grows in our Lake District, to be a more handsome tree than the other. It seems to be more immune from attack by the caterpillar of the moth Tortrix viridana, which often works such havoc among the oaks of southern woodlands. It Is said that the severe defoliation caused by this insect may lead to the development in the wood of two annual rings for one year, owing to the arrest of growth between the loss of the first crop of leaves, and the formation of the second.
The Turkey oak (Q. Cerris) is about as high as the common oak, but more pyramidal in form, with attenuated leaves, the lobes of which are pointed, and dark-brovm, long and narrow sessile acorns in cupules with bristly, moss-like scales, giving the name. Mossy- cupped oak. A native of Southern Europe and Asia Minor, it abounds on the Turkish peninsula, and is common in Italy. It was introduced here about 1735. The bark is darker than that of the common oaks. The flowers of the two trees are arranged in much the same way. The fruits grow little in the first season, and in the second Spring are still small. Evelyn held a poor opinion of the timber of this oak. ** We shall say little," he remarked, '* of the Cerris or Mgilops, goodly to look on, but for little else."
The evergreen oak, the Ilex, (Q. Ilex) is also called Holm Oak, from a fancied resemblance to the holly, the glossy, dark-green leaves being but faintly lobed, and often spinous, especially on young plants. It is an oak of parks and gardens. From keeping its lower branches it has rather the appearance of an immense shrub than a timber-tree, but grows into a splendid tree, and may reach a height of 90 feet. The glossy leaves shine bravely in the sun, or, when rippled by the wind, show their light undersides with pleasing effect. Flowers and fruits are like those of the common oak, but the male flowers are lighter and in shorter clusters, the fruits are longer, and sharp-pointed, the acorns close-set in the cups. This is a tree of the Mediterranean countries.
WOODLAND TREES 31
It is not clear why Linnaeus appropriated Its Roman name, ilex, for the holly. Pliny has much to say about the ilexes of Rome in his day, referring to one in the Vatican older than the city, and to still older ones at Tivoli ; but exaggeration is suggested when the foundation of those cities are compared to the dates of Pliny's life ; Rome being above eight hundred years old when he died.
Akin to the ilex is the cork oak (Q. suber), belonging to the South of Europe, a lowly member of its noble family, yet one of the most useful : known in this country as a curiosity. The leaves are much like those of Q. IleXy but rather leathery, and more woolly on the under surface. It was appreciated by the ancients, who used its bark much as it is used to-day ; a particular service was for the soles of the sandals of the Roman ladies, not only so that they might go dry-shod, but might add to their stature. Another Roman use was for swimming- jackets and floats, and sometimes for stopping holes in casks. Byron, in " Childe Harold," sang of *' The cork trees hoar that crown the shaggy steep," and Southey, in '* Roderick," describes its appearance in the gleam of a traveller's fire.
In all, there are between two and three hundred varieties of the oak in the Old and New Worlds ; none with timber to rival the British oak's.
THE MONARCH OAK
Sit here by me, where the most beaten track
Runs through the forest — hundreds of huge oaks,
Gnarl'd — older than the thrones of Europe — look,
What breadth, height, strength — torrents of eddying bark I
Some hollow-hearted from exceeding age —
That never be thy lot nor mine I — and some
Pillaring a leaf-sky on their monstrous boles,
Sound at the core as we.
Tennyson, The Foresters.
As the Hon is king of beasts, and the eagle, king of birds, the oak is the king of the forest, most noble and puissant of trees, largest and strongest, eternal emblem of grandeur, strength and endurance, of force that resists as the lion is of force that acts. Its story is linked with all the struggles of our national life. On the earliest page of our history the oak stands like a king indeed among the trees ; for time was when forests of oak covered the most of England. Each oak is a garden, a city, even a country supporting a vast population, insects beyond number, a home for bird and beast, a food-store for multitudes. The Celtic name is a fitting one : Quercus, signifying, a fine tree (from quer, fine, and cuez, a tree ; but we must note that some say the word is from the Greek, choiros, a pig, signifying the satis- action of pigs in acorns.)
From the days of Homer, the oak has been a proverb for strength. ** Thou," says one of his heroes to a man who quailed, ** art not made of the oak of ancient story. The Arcadians believed that they were the first people, that the oak was the first created of trees, and that
32
WOODLAND TREES 33
** Out of the teeming bark of oaks men burst.** It is true that the oak is native of nearly every part of the globe, and all nations admire its strength, and do it reverence :
For it had been an ancient tree. Sacred with many a mystery.
Few writers have described the ocik better than Virgil, in the ** Georgics,** in the well-remembered lines beginning,
Jove*s own tree, That holds the woods in awful sovereignty.
Gilpin, in his " Forest Scenery'* (1791), dwells lovingly on the main characteristics of the oak as noted by Virgil. The first, he says, is its firmness, and the second, its stoutness, its fortes ramos. The limbs of most trees spring from the trunk ; in the oak they divide from it, and carry a share of the substance of the stem, so that you hardly know which is stem and which branch. ** This gives particular propriety to the epithet fortes, in charac- terizing the branches of the oak ; and hence its sinewy elbows are of such peculiar use in ship-building. Who- ever therefore does not mark the fortes ramos of the oak, might as well, in painting a Hercules, omit his muscles.*' The third feature is the twisting of its branches : ** The limbs of an oak are continually twisting here and there in various contortions ; and like the course of a river sport and play in every possible direction ; sometimes in long reaches, and sometimes in shorter elbows.** Then there is the expansive spread, the boughs, however twisted, taking a horizontal direction, overshadowing a large space, so that, like a monarch, the oak takes possession of the soil. And he pictures the oak that gives life and dignity to some ruined tower or Gothic arch, by stretching its branches athwart their ivied walls giving them a kind of majesty coeval with itself ; or he sees it throwing its arms over the purling brook, beholding its reverend image below ; and speaks of it as a tree that may happily be introduced into the ** lowest ** csene — as by Milton :
c
34 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
Hard by, a cottage chimney smokes From between two aged oaks.
A noble tribute to the oaks strength, paid by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, is often quoted, in which he remarks, there is a mother-idea in each kind of tree, and the oak*s mother-idea is strength. ** I wonder,'* he asks, ** if you ever thought of the smgle mark of supremacy which distinguishes this tree from all our other forest trees ? All the rest of them shirk the work of resisting gravity : the oak alone defies it. It chooses the horizontal direc- tion for its limbs, so that their whole weight may tell, and then stretches them out fifty or sixty feet, so that the strain may be mighty enough to be worth resisting/'
Strutt's description of the oak's pictorial quality is often quoted too ; how it unites beauty with strength ; how elegant are the strongly-ribbed leaves ; how the tortuous irregularity of the branches admirably con- trasts with the richness of the clustered foliage. The general form of the oak he describes as expansive and luxuriant. Its character is best expressed by the pencil in bold and roundish lines, whether growing in groups, or as such a solitary tree as Mason described in his ** Caractacus " : —
Behold yon oak. How stern he frowns, and with his broad brawn arms Chills the pale plain beneath him.
In the ancient times, men swore by the oak ; witness this passage from Loudon's ** Arboretum " : Socrates often swore by the oak ; and the women of Priene, a maritime city of Ionia, in matters of importance, took an oath by the gloomy oak, on account of a great battle that took place under an oak between the Prienians and other lonians. On Mount Lycaeus, in Arcadia, there was a temple of Jupiter with a fountain, into which the priest threw an oak branch, in times of drought, to produce rain. The Greeks had two remarkable sayings relative to this tree, one of which was the phrase, I speak to the oak,' as a solemn asservation ; and the other, * Born of an oak,' applied to a foundling ; because.
OAK
36 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
anciently, children, when the parents were unable to provide for them, were frequently exposed in the hollow of an oak tree/*
It was a pleasant Roman custom to give wreaths of oak-leaves to citizens who saved other citizens* lives, civic crowns, as they were called :
An oaken wreath his hardy temples bore, Mark of a citizen preserved he wore.
Scipio Africanus, offered the crown for saving the life of his father in battle, nobly refused it. Shakespeare tells how Coriolanus won his crown :
He prov'd best man i' the field ; and for his meed Was brow-bound with the oak.
Boughs of oak with acorns were carried in the marriage ceremonies, emblem of fruitfulness.
In legendary history, the oak was invested with sanctity by Hebrews, Greeks and Romans, Britons and Gauls. From the earliest times the glory of the tree seems to have impressed mens minds, and inspired reverence. The Greeks held it sacred to their greatest god ; the Romans dedicated it to Jupiter. Peasants would crown their heads with oak-leaf wreaths before reaping their harvests. Homer sang how Zeus gave oracles from the oaks of Dodona, and to these trees the inhabitants of all Greece would make pilgrimage, to know the gods will. The old tradition ran, that two black doves took their flight from the city of Thebes, one flying to the temple of Jupiter Ammon, the other to Dodona ; where, with a human voice, it acquainted all men that Jupiter had consecrated the ground, which in future would give oracles. So the trees became endowed with the gift of prophecy. And when some were cut down to build the ship Argo, the beams and mast of that ship often spoke, and warned the Argonauts of calamities in store. Herodotus gives what he calls the explanation of the story of Dodona s oaks, that some Phoenician merchants carried off an Egyptian priestess from Thebes to Greece, where she took up residence in the Forest of Dodona,
WOODLAND TREES 37
erecting a temple at the foot of an old oak. It is sus- pected that when the trees spoke, they were hollow trees in which priests were concealed. The oracular powers of the oaks are alluded to by the Greek and Latin poets, and were remembered by those of our time : as Cowper, addressing the Yardley Oak :
Oh I couldst thou speak As in Dodona once thy kindred trees Oracular, I would not curious ask The future, best unknown ; but, at thy mouth Inquisitive, the less ambiguous past I
So Wordsworth, in lines addressed to a Spanish oak, exclaims : —
Oak of Guernica I tree of holier power Than that which in Dodona did enshrine (So faith too fondly deem'd) a voice divine. Heard from the depths of its aerial bower. How canst thou flourish at this blighting hour?
Ovid and others tell us the story of Milo of Croton, he whose strength and voracity were such, that he could carry a bullock on his shoulders, kill it with a blow of his fist, and eat it in a day — that in his old age, he attempted to tear an old oak up by the roots ; but the trunk split, and the cleft united to lock his hands, and, helpless, he was devoured by wild beasts.
The Romans considered the oak as the emblem of hospitality ; whence the story of Jupiter and Mercury, travelling in disguise, and coming to the cottage of Philemon, a poor old man who, with his wife Baucis, treated the gods with kindness. Jupiter, in reward, changed his poor cot into a magnificent temple ; and when they were so old as to wish for death, turned Baucis into a lime tree, and Philemon into an oak ; the two trees entwining their branches, to shade the portal of the temple.
Into such legendary paths are we led, if we read the oak s history.
The ancients believed that spirits were imprisoned in trees — Dryads ; as remembered, perhaps, by Prospero, when scolding his dainty Ariel :
38 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
If thou more murmurest, I will rend an oak, And peg thee in its knotty entrails, till Thou hast howled away twelve winters.
There are oaks that seem so friendly that we could think of them as the abodes of benign spirits, and each tree in an old wood of oak may have its marked character. We may recall the beautiful story of the Hamadryads, so favourite a theme of the Greek poets, those nymphs each of whom was ** doomed to a life coeval with her oak,*' as Pindar sang. We have the pathetic story of the Hamadryad who implored the woodman to spare the oak to which her life clung :
Loud through the air resounds the woodman's stroke, When lo I a voice breaks from the groaning oak. " Spare, spare my life ! a trembling virgin spare I Oh. listen to the Hamadryad's prayer ! No longer let that fearful axe resound. Preserve the tree to which my life is bound ! See, from the bark my blood in torrents flows, I faint, I sink, I perish from your blows."
And we may recall that among Celtic nations, the god Teut was worshipped under the form of an oak, and the Britons regarded the oak as the symbol of the god Tarnawa, god of thunder. The Druids made homage to the oak, and took their name, goes the story, from the Greek word for the tree, drys ; whence the name. Dryads, for the tree's spirits. Pliny remarked truly that mistletoe, the Druid's sacred plant, rarely grew upon oaks :
The sacred oaks Among whose awful shades the Druids strayed. To cut the hallow'd mistletoe, and hold High converse with their gods.
They planted oaks, worshipped and sacrificed beneath them ; the yule log on the altar was of oak, and of the leaves the priests made their chaplets. And as Cowper sang ;
It seems idolatry with some excuse. When our forefather Druids in their oaks Imagined sanctity.
Authority says that the chorus, ** Hey derry down," was a Druidic chant, signifying, " In a circle the oak
WOODLAND TREES 39
move around." A man being brought to judgment would be tried under an oak, while standing within a circle drawn by the chief Druid s wand. The Saxons held parliament under an oak, and the famous conference between Saxons and Britons, after the Saxon invasion, was held beneath the oaks of Dartmoor. Historians have noted that the cradle of Edward II, at Carnarvon Castle, was made of oak, in the hope that the mystical wood might conciliate the Welsh prejudices against the Britons.
We do not turn many pages of the Bible, before finding a reference to the oak : *' And they gave unto Jacob all the strange gods which were in their hand, and all their earrings which were in their ears ; and Jacob hid them under the oak which was by Shechem.** The oak of the Bible is a tree nearly resembling the evergreen ilex. Some authorities maintain that the oak of Shechem was the terebinth, or turpentine- tree, but as the Rev. C. A. Johns wrote in his ** Forest Trees,*' ** It is difficult for the reader of the English Version of the Bible to connect the name with any other notion than that of a tree agreeing closely in character with the oak of his own country. Whatever may be the botanical difference between the two, it is still ' the oak ' of Palestine as much as Quercus Rohm is * the oak * of Britain.** He explains the difficulty of identifying the Bible trees by the simi- larity of the names, elah and allon. Each word occurs in Genesis, and is rendered ** the oak *' ; in Isaiah they occur in juxtaposition, the Authorized Version giving elah ** the teil-tree,** alloriy ** the oak.** Probably the oak of Shechem was remarkable for its size, and it seems to have been held in veneration, for it was chosen as a meet shelter for the grave of Deborah, and distinguished by the name, ** Allon-bachuth,** the Oak of Weeping. Under the oak of Mamre, Abraham entertained the angels, and this oak also was venerated in after years and ages, and became a place of superstitious worship, so that the great Constantine, esteemed the first Christian Emperor of Rome, was moved to write an epistle for- bidding the practices.
40 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
It was by an oak that the hair of Absalom was caught, by the thick boughs of a great oak.'* Joshua, making a solemn covenant with the people in Shechem, set up in witness a stone under an oak.
The earliest notice of the ilex in Britain is by Gerard, who, writing in 1597, says that ** it is a stranger in England, notwithstanding there is here and there a tree thereof that hath been procured from beyond the seas." It is the commonest evergreen of Italy ; ** the eternal ilex.** The poet, Garcilasso, *' prince of Castilian poets,** pictures the shepherd lying beneath oak or ilex :
In calm idlesse laid,
Supine in the cool shade Of oak or ilex, beech or pendent pine,
Sees his flocks feeding stray.
Whitening a length of way, Or numbers up his homeward tending kine.
The learned have disputed about the oak s name, from the Saxon ak, a word found in some form in all Germanic languages, from which also the word acorn is derived. The theory was put forward by one of the earliest writers on tree-names. Turner, whose ** Names of Plants,** was published in the mid-days of the sixteenth century, that acorn means *' corn of the oak.** He gives this quaint definition : *' Oke, whose fruite we call an acorn or an eykorn (that is, ye corne or fruite of an Eike), are harde of digestion and norishe very much, but they make raw humores. Wherefore we forbid the use of them for meates.'*
Naturally the oak*s name, in Celtic and Saxon — ac^ as they still pronounce the word in the North — is im- pressed upon places innumerable ; for one Ashford, Elmhurst, or Poplar we have hosts of oaks, as in Oakley, Acton, Acklands, Accrington, Aikenhead, or Oakham, finding all manner of corruptions, oke and ocke running into oax and oxs, and these into auck, hoke, and wok, as in Woking. The Gaelic word, daur, and the derivative, doire, pronounced ** derry,** have given rise to numerous names, like Londonderry.
The ancient name of Britain, according to Welsh
WOODLAND TREES 41
bards, was Clas Merddin, *' the sea-defended green spot," and history has a record of a naval engagement, before the days of great Caesar, between the Romans and the Veneti, aided by the Britons, whose vessels were so stout that the beaks of the Roman ships scarcely made any impression thereon : vessels built of oaken planks, with skins for sails.
Noble chapters indeed are those in the oak's story telling of its services to the builders of ships and of houses. With Greek and Roman the oak was the favourite tree wherewith to build, whether house, bridge, or ship, and its form was perhaps the prototype of their temples. Before King Alfred, primitive man hollowed thirty-foot long canoes out of oaks, such as one found in Lincolnshire, in 1 8 1 6 ; and it was from heart of oak that the Norsemen hewed their long-ships. The Saxons built their oared galleys of oak ; and after the Conquest the British navy was established, and so firmly, thanks largely to the oak, that in the reign of King John the right of England was proclaimed to the dominion of the seas. The oak gave our fathers piles for foundations and bridges, and so well it resisted water that the stakes driven into the bed of the Thames, to hinder the landing of Julius Caesar, were found to be sound after some two thousand years. Greens tead, in Essex, is widely renowned for a church believed to date to the tenth century, formed of square oaken trunks. Oak roofed the baronial castle and hall, panelled the rooms, and supplied the tables. Winchester has preserved through centuries a great oaken table, a transverse slice from a mammoth tree, as the real old ** King Arthur's Round Table.'* An old story tells that it was shown by Henry VIII, to the Emperor Charles V, as the actual oaken table made and placed there by King Arthur : hence Drayton's song :
And so great Arthur's seat ould Winchester prefers, Whose ould round table yet she vaunteth to be hers.
Antiquarians state that the ** tabulae rotundae " were introduced by Stephen, reducing the table's age by some
42 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
six hundred years, yet leaving it to boast of some seven or eight centuries. Norman woodwork remains in our churches. The oaken shrine of Edward the Confessor, m Westminster Abbey, is still sound after nearly nine hundred years.
The type of oak which appealed to the builders of England's wooden walls of old was different from the forester's ideal of to-day. The shipbuilders liked such oaks as grew as hedgerow timber, in meadows and parks, or in woodlands where they were not crowded, grew as they listed, and developed the stout crooks for knees and ribs. Evelyn recommended growing oaks m such a way that they would produce curved wood. Some advise,* he says, ** that in planting of oaks, &c., four, or five be suffer 'd to stand very neer to one another, and then to leave the most prosperous, when they find the rest to disturb his growth ; but I conceive it were better to plant them at such distances, as they may least incom- mode one another : for timber-trees, I would have none nearer then forty foot where they stand closest ; especially of the spreading kind.'* The forester to-day plants thickly, aiming at long, clean stems undamaged by branch-knots, and discouraging an excess of branches.
To find the right oaks for lock-gates of the Manchester Ship Canal all England had to be searched. Gilbert White, in his natural history of Selborne, had a note of interest on this point, showing how the close growing of oaks encourages the long boles :
" On the Blackmoor estate there is a small wood called Losels, of a few acres, that was lately furnished with a set of oaks of a peculiar growth and great value : they were tall and taper like firs, but, standing near together, had very small heads, — only a little brush, without any large limbs. About twenty years ago (his book was published in 1 789) the bridge at the Toy, near Hampton Court, being much decayed, some trees were wanted for the repairs, that were fifty feet long without bough, and would measure twelve inches diameter at the little end. Twenty such trees did a purveyor find in this
WOODLAND TREES 43
little wood, with this advantage, that many of them answered the description at sixty feet. These trees were sold for £20 a-piece/*
It was in the centre of this wood where stood the Raven Oak, of which the tragic story was told by Gilbert White how, when the tree was felled one February, the mother raven clung to her nest and her young while the tree tottered to its fall, until the crash of the boughs brought her dead to the ground. Raven Oaks and Raven Clumps are marked still on many maps ; alas, that the ravens have long since vanished.
In the age-old story of the oak, the subject of pannage " forms another chapter of curious interest, pannage being the term for the acorns and beech- mast upon which swine were fattened. The pannage season ran from the second week of September into the third week of November. During the Saxon rule, and after the Conquest, the oak was more valued for its fruit than for its timber ; Pliny relates that in his day acorns formed the chief wealth of many nations ; and in time of scarcity were ground into meal for bread. The Romans had a law, he relates, that the owner of a tree might gather up his acorns, though they should have fallen on another man's ground. An historical note of times nearer memory tells how, during the Peninsula War, the natives and French alike fed on the acorns in the woods of Portugal and Spain.
As the navy grew, the value of the oak's timber made it our pre-eminent tree. The old-time view of the oak and its uses may be gained from this appreciation in Holinshed's ** Description of England " :
** Howbeit as everie soile dooth not beare all kinds of wood, so there is not anie wood, parke, hedgerow, grove, or forrest, that is not mixed with diverse, as oke, ash, hasell, hawthorne, birch, beech, hardbeame, hull, sorfe, quicken aspe, poplers, wild cherie, and such like, whereof oke hath alwaies the preheminence, as most meet for building and the navie, whereunto it is reserved. This tree bringeth foorth also a profitable kind of mast.
44 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
whereby such as dwell neere unto the aforesaid places doo cherish and bring up innumerable heards of swine. In time of plentie of this mast, our red and fallow deere will not let to participat thereof with our hogs, more than our nete : yea our common pultrie also if they may come unto them. But as this abundance doth proove verie pernicious unto the first, so these egs which these latter doe bring foorth (beside blackenesse in color and bitternesse of tast) have not seldome beene found to breed diverse diseases to such persons as have eaten of the same."
The first notices of the oak in Britain are in the ** Saxon Chronicles," which shows how the oak forests were valued, not alone for the acorns, for fattening swine, but for sustaining man in days of famine. The year 1116 was described in the ** Chronicles " as one of dreadful dearth and mortality, " a very heavy- timed, vexatious, and destructive year," — ** This year, also, was deficient in mast, that there never was heard such in all this land." About the end of the seventh century. King Ina made laws as to pannage, and as to the pains to be suffered by those who damaged oaks : any man who felled a tree, under whose shadow thirty hogs could stand, would be liable to a fine of sixty shillings. In the succeeding century, Elfhelmus reserved the pannage of two hundred hogs for his lady, in part of her dower ; it shows the value attached to acorns, in those days, that they were deemed a fit portion for a princess. Kings, also, would give their retainers donations of the produce of an oak forest. In Domesday Book the value of the woods was reckoned by the number of hogs they would fatten. So closely did the King's men make that survey, that woods are mentioned of the value of a single hog ; as in some places they put down the value of eels in mill- ponds, of herrings in the sea, porpoises in tidal rivers, and the very bee-hives in cottagers' gardens. Small wonder that the King's inquisition was resented ; as the Saxon chronicler lamented, ** So very narrowly he lit speir (search) it out, that there was not a single
WOODLAND TREES 45
hide nor yard of land — it is a shame to tell and it thought him no shame to do — nor so much as an ox nor a cow nor a swine was left, that was not set in his writ/* Norman princes encroached on the old rights of pannage, in their zeal for hunting ; and this was one of the grievances which King John was forced to redress in the charter of the liberties of the forest.
Old-time uses of the oak, apart from pannage, and ship and house building, make another long chapter in its story. Oak yields excellent charcoal, and in the Iron Age of Sussex this charcoal from the oaks of the Weald smelted the fine Sussex iron.. Through ages, in Europe the oak's bark has been the chief agent for tanning. The most valuable tannin comes from young trees, of about twenty years growth. The bark is stripped when the sap is rising in Spring. In Sussex woodlands, it is an old sign that the bark is ripe for stripping when the little bird, the wryneck, arrives in April, to attack the insects beginning to stir in the recesses of the bark ; hence the bird is known as the rinding, or flooring bird. In the old days, when a large proportion of the agricul- tural population was employed in felling oaks and stripping the bark, the hawk-like cry of the wryneck would be anxiously expected by the woodman. The scene when the stripping goes forward is always a pic- turesque one. The bark, as stripped in cylinders, is dried on horizontal poles, and is built into stacks.
All parts of the tree abound in astringent matter ; even the leaves and sawdust will tan leather. In the old days of vegetable dyeing infusions of the bark were used to dye yarns, as they are to-day by handicraft workers who spin, weave and dye wool. As to the feeding value of acorns, Evelyn stated that a peck of acorns a day, with a little bran, will make a hog increase a pound weight a day for two months together. The acorns nowadays nourish the deer in English parks, the pheasants, and divers members of the crow family. A rare use of acorns is the roasting of them for a coffee, which experi- mentalists recommend from time to time.
46 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
Authority says that oak timber is neither the hardest, heaviest, the most supple or toughest of woods, but combines well the average of these qualities : is hard, firm, compact, and with a glossy surface. The piles of Old London Bridge, taken up in 1827, proved the oaks durability, when found to be sound after more than six centuries' use. No British timber is more useful, though now almost obsolete for ship-building, while in house- building cheaper imported timbers take its place. The oak's crooked timber, so valued formerly for ships* ** bends '* and ** knees,' still is valued for barges and coast-boats, and no artificial means has been invented for reproducing the natural bends in all their strength. Oak is cleft into pales for fencing, for spokes for wheels, for ladder-rungs, occasionally for shingles for church spires and the turrets for houses, for field-gates and posts — which form an important part of the country timber-merchant's business, in spite of overwhelming competition from foreign redwood gates — for the naves of heavy wheels, and in mining districts for pit-props ; and among minor uses is the making of what a timber- merchant would call undertakers' oak. After an oak has been felled for timber, shoots rise abundantly from the stump, and the brushwood has a value for the making of crates and hoops.
In medicine, the bark has been of service since the days of Dioscorides, and may still be used as an astringent. It was held of old to cure consumption, a disease which tanners defied.
One Paulus, a Danish physician, made a deposition that ** A handful or two of small oak-buttons mingled with oats and given to horses which are black will, in a few days' eating, alter their colour to a fine dapple grey ; and this because of the vitriol abounding in the tree. '
One more little bit of oak tree lore must be quoted about the oak-apples, from the mouth of the botanist, Gerard : " The oke apples being broken in sunder about the time of their withering, doe foreshew the sequell of the yeare, as the expert Kentish husbandmen have
WOODLAND TREES 47
observed by the living things found in them ; as, if they finde an ant, they foretell plenty of graine to ensue ; if a white worm, like a gentill or magot, then they prognosticate murren of beasts and cattell ; if a spider, then (say they) we shall have a pestilence, or some such like sickenesse to follow amongst men. These things the learned, also, have observed and noted ; for Matthiolus, writing upon Dioscorides, saith that, before they have an hole through them, they containe in them
CORK OAK
either a flie, a spider, or a worme : if a flie, then warre insueth ; if a creeping worme, then scarcitie of victuals ; if a running spider, then followeth great sickenesse.** Extravagances aside, the observations for the most part are correct, comments Loudon, for diversity of season will affect the development of the apples.
The galls are caused by midge-like gall- wasps (Cynipida) which deposit their eggs in roots, stems, or leaves ; and their study is curiously complicated. One insect may, at different stages of life, be responsible for different sorts of galls. On dissecting a gall there may be found either the insect causing it ; insects which have invaded
48 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
it ; minute insects whose larvae are parasitic on the preceding ones ; or minuter ones still, whose young are parasitic on the parasites.
An enormous number of insects prey on the oak, possibly half our leaf-eating insects ; in some seasons not a leaf may be left intact, or the tree may be stripped cleanly. A statement traced to Loudon is often quoted, that nearly two thousand species of insects are supposed to be wholly or partially supported by the oak ; another authority, with more circumstantial details, gives us this curious inventory of the oaks pensioners : ** 500 insects, 36 fungi, 16 hanging mosses, 7 leaf-mosses, and 3 liverworts.'* The larvae of the small stag-beetle attack the young wood, and other beetles are given to haunting oaks on Summer evenings ; the larvae of the wood-leopard moth, goat moth, and others may feed in oaks ; those of the mottled umber moth are often seen hanging by threads from stripped twigs. Deadly devasta- tion is worked by the leaf-rolling caterpillar of the pretty greenish moth, Tortrix viridana, which appears in some seasons in myriads, and strips the trees bare. Young shoots are selected by many species of CynipidcB — gall-wasps — and their allies, as places for egg-laying, which gives rise to the galls from which few oaks are free, like the oak-apple, and the galls on the backs of leaves.
The oak, unlike some trees, notably the horse-chestnut, is a well-beloved hostel of the birds ; but never, one supposes, was an oak better patronized by feathered guests than a decayed veteran of the Forest of Dean, about which this remarkable story is vouched for, by the author of ** English Forests" (1853): ** On the topmost branches a pair of sparrow-hawks had made them a nest, which, at the time I examined it, con- tained four eggs. In a hollow of the tree, near the top, was a jackdaw's nest, with five young ones. A little lower, a woodpecker had another, with five eggs in it. Still lower, was a nuthatch's nest, with seven young ones. And near the foot of the tree, in
WOODLAND TREES 49
one of the crevices of the bark, which was overgrown with ivy, a pair of wrens had made another nest, in which were several eggs. These birds seemed to Hve in perfect harmony, and were, as far as I could discover, a real * happy family.' '* I would scarcely like to suggest that the sparrow-hawk was biding his time, until the young birds grew to be a fit size to make a dinner.
One debt we owe to the rook is the planting of oak trees. On open downs, or on open fields, we may often observe isolated seedling oaks a mile or several miles from any mature trees ; and, about these seedlings, acorn-husks are likely to be found, stabbed as by a rook s bill. The rooks like to pluck the acorns from the tree in their stalked cups, and carry them far, whereas acorns shed from the cups would be too slippery. A single young oak, found some time ago on the island of Hoy, Orkney, was presumed to have been brought by a rook to that remote place from across the Pentland Firth. A curious story about rooks planting an oak-wood is told in Robinson's natural history of Westmorland and Cumberland (1709). The writer described how, when near Rose Castle, he observed a flock of rooks engaged in planting acorns, digging holes in some mossy ground with their bills, then dropping in the acorns and covering them with moss. Twenty-five years later there had grown up a grove of oaks (the landlord having protected the seedlings as curiosities) of a suitable height for the rooks to build their nests therein.
It is an old notion that oaks are more commonly struck by lightning than other trees : Shakespeare alludes to it more than once :
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulph'rous bolt Sphtt'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak Than the soft myrtle.
The oak is often conjoined with another tree ; it may absorb another growing close beside it ; or, becoming hollow, another may spring from within, producing a flourishing head encased by the oaken trunk. In the
Arboretum * are notes of an oak conjoined with
50 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
an ash at Welbeck, and of an oak with a beech growing from its root near Reading. Hollies and thorns commonly conjoin with the monarchs. Near Bewdley it was a yew-tree which sprang up within a hollow oak, to the height of some twenty feet, the two trees entwining their branches, we are told, " in the most friendly manner possible. * Elders and rowans commonly spring from decayed oaks, arising from seeds dropped by the birds. One thorn, enclosed m an oak, sent branches m several places through the oak's trunk. An old oak commonly supports the fern, polypody, which adds a gracious touch of lightness to its rugged boss.
A remarkable feature of the oak's foliage is the second crop of leaves often borne in late Summer, called Lammas shoots ; bringing a sort of second Spring to the oak-woods. This was observed by White of Selborne who remarked.
When oaks are quite stripped of their leaves by chafers, they are clothed again, soon after Mid-Summer, with a beautiful foliage ; but beeches, horse-chestnuts, and maples, once defaced by those insects, never recover their beauty for the whole season." The fresh green leaves which suddenly emerge from resting buds, which mysteriously have awakened, and burst their scales, differ in details from the Spring foliage ; and by thus producing two generations of branches in one season, the oak curiously influences its ultimate shape.
Strange stories tell of treasures which oaks have hoarded through centuries, and all manner of curiosities. When a famed tree called the Gelonos Oak was felled in Monmouthshire, the sawyers found a stone embedded a yard deep in the tree's body, with no symptom of decay on the wood. Crucifixes and images have been found embedded, and commemorative inscription plates ; and Lauder tells of an oak in which was found the horn of a large deer.
From first to last the oak's life suggests placidity. It lives so long, it can afford to cultivate the amiable quality of being leisurely. At every season it expresses dignity and calmness ; and in the eyes of many lovers
WOODLAND TREES 51
never appears more majestic than in the sad days of decay. The poets have dwelt on the oak*s dying grandeur ; Spenser singing of a once goodly oak,
Whilome had been the king of the field. And mochel masts to the husband did yield, And with his nuts larded many swine ; But now the grey moss marr'd his rine ; His bared boughs were beaten with storms, His top was bald, and wasted with worms.
So Shakespeare :
Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out. Upon the brook that brawls along this v/ood ;
Whose boughs were moss'd with age. And high top bald with dry antiquity.
On that high bald top, one last leaf may be seen in the still, dark days before Christmas, such a day as may come with a sudden thaw,
When there is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan. That dances as often as dance it can. Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up to the sky.
Tennyson's song comes also to mmd, as a last thought on the oak, stripped of all its foliage, in the sad days of the Fall :
All his leaves, Fall'n at length. Look, he stands. Trunk and bough. Naked strength.
STORIES OF FAMED OAKS
We have oaks looked upon by Saxon eyes ; like * The Great Oak " of Newland, in Gloucestershire — 47^ feet in girth at five feet from the ground. Dryden*s summary of the oaks life is not far short of the mark :
Three centuries he grows ; and three he stays Supreme in state ; and in three more decays.
The story of our famous oaks has been chronicled almost as faithfully as the story of our famous men — especially in a work by Professor Burnet, giving the legends of individual oaks of ancient date, in the " SylvaBritannica** of Strutt, or the "Arboretum Britannicum,*' where the stories of the oaks are ranged according to counties.
A gigantic oak must have been one whose remains were found in Yorkshire, at Hatfield Chase, at the opening of the eighteenth century ; its butt end was 36 feet in circumference, and it was computed that the tree might have been 240 feet in height.
An old history of Staffordshire mentions an oak, beneath the shadow of whose boughs four thousand three hundred and seventy-four men could stand, as was computed. In the Wallace Oak, at Ellerslie, in Renfrewshire, Wallace, according to a legend, and three hundred followers, hid themselves from the English.
The Parliament Oak, at Clipstone Park, Nottingham- shire, has the story, that it was named from a Parliament held by Edward I in its shade.
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Many stories are told of an oak known as the Cowthorpe Oak, in Yorkshire, mentioned in editions of Evelyn's and Strutt s ** Sylva*s '* ; with a trunk reputed to be 78 feet in circumference. Seventy persons at one time crowded within the hollow of the trunk, possibly including many children sitting on each others shoulders. The hollow was supposed to be capable of containing forty men. Dead branches, appearing above living foliage like stag s horns, are a characteristic of such old oaks ; and the Cowthorpe Oak gained a majestic appearance from its ruined and riven-looking dead branches spreading in all directions in Summer above the luxuriant foliage of the lower limbs.
Damorys Oak in Dorsetshire had a cavity 16 feet long, and 20 feet high, and in the days of the Common- wealth was used by an old man as an ale-house ; the end of the tree came in 1755.
Another old-time curiosity was the Greendale Oak, in Nottinghamshire, which, in 1 724, was so cut through its trunk as to allow a carriage and four horses to pass through.
The Winfarthing Oak in Norfolk is reputed to have been called *' The Old Oak " in the days of the Conqueror, and was given a plate with the inscription, ** This oak in circumference, at the extremity of the roots, is 70 feet, in the middle, 40 feet. — 1820." The interior, which resembled the rugged masonry befitting a Druidical temple, was fitted with seats and a table.
A remarkable oak in the Duke of Portland's park at Welbeck, in 1790, was called ** The Duke's Walking- stick," its trunk rising a clear 70 feet before forming a crown ; its total height, 1 1 1 feet.
The famed and ancient Fairlop Oak was the pride of Hainault Forest, Essex. The circumference of its trunk near the ground was nearly 50 feet ; and the bole divided into eleven vast branches. For many years, an annual fair was held beneath the old tree, and no booth was permitted to extend beyond its shade. This festival owed its origin to a worthy citizen named ** Good Day,"
54 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
who, about the year 1 720, was wont to invite his friends to dine with him on the first Friday in July, on beans and bacon, under the tree. The orgies which thus came to pass left their mark on the oak, and it was much injured by gypsies, who made its trunk their place of shelter. Mr. Good Day dying, his coffin was made of one of the limbs, to be buried in Barking churchyard. A gale of February, 1820, stretched the patriarch low. From a portion of its timber was built the pulpit of New Church, St. Pancras.
** The Oaks of Chaucer" are celebrated in the annals of poetry, growing of old at Donnington Castle, where the sage spent several of his latter years in retirement. The largest was the King's oak, remarkable in that its erect trunk rose 50 feet in height before any bough or knot appeared ; the next in size was the Queen's oak, with branches like the horns of a ram, and a third was Chaucer's, ** a very goodly tree," as Evelyn said, beneath which
The laughing sage. Carolled his moral song.
Another oak with a place in literature is the Swilcar Lawn Oak, a veteran in Needwood Forest, of enormous girth, known by historical documents to have been a great tree seven hundred years ago : thus hymned by the poet Mundy :
High amidst trees, with many a frown. Huge Swilcar shakes his tresses brown : Outspreads his bare arms to the skies, The ruins of six centuries.
The most famous of Staffordshire oaks was the Royal Oak of Boscobel which sheltered the fugitive Charles II, and was prematurely destroyed by relic-hunters ; though there is a touching tree-story of the King, when restored, watering, with his royal hands, acorns from the tree, set near St. James's Palace, where Marlborough House now stands. The Royal Oak, '* Felicissimam arborem," as an inscription in Latin described it, perished many years ago ; and upon it was bestowed the singular honour
WOODLAND TREES 55
of being transplanted into the heavens : Rohur Caroli is now a small constellation in the Southern Hemisphere. As Cowley sang of the Royal Oak :
The Royal Youth, born to out-brave his Fate, Within a neighbouring oak maintained his state : The faithful boughs in kind allegiance spread Their shelt'ring branches round his awful head, Twin'd their rough arms, and thicken'd all the shade.
Of literary interest is Cowper*s Oak, hymned bv him in ** Yardley Chase,*' an oak known also as * Judith, from the legend that it was planted by Judith, niece of William the Conqueror, at Castle Ashby. Apostro- phizing the tree, Cowper wrote :
Thou wert a bauble once, a cup and ball. Which babes might play with ; and the thievish jay Seeking her food, with ease might have purloin'd The auburn nut that held thee, swallowing down Thy yet close-folded latitude of boughs. And all thy embryo vastness, at a gulp.
Time made thee what thou wert — King of the Woods I And Time hath made thee what thou art — a cave For owls to roost in !
The Spring Finds thee not less alive to her sweet form, Than yonder upstarts of the neighbouring wood. So much thy juniors, who their birth received Half a millennium since the date of thine.
Windsor Forest is steeped in the stories of famous trees, the most famous being William the Conqueror's Oak, supposed to have been a special favourite of the King who, on making this a royal forest, enacted laws for its preservation. Within its hollow walls Professor Burnet gave a lunch-party in 1829 : ** It would accom- modate," he wrote, " at least twenty persons with standing room ; and ten or twelve might sit down comfortably to dinner. I think, at Willis's and in Guildhall, I have danced a quadrille in a smaller space."
In Windsor Forest stood, until 1863, the renowned Heme's Oak, hymned by Shakespeare :
There is an old tale goes, that Heme the hunter. Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest, Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight. Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns ; And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle.
56 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
It was the keeper, not the tree, that was stag-horned. He hved, the story goes, before the time of EHzabeth, and hanged himself on this oak, m dread of some disgrace, his ghost haunting the spot. The naturahst Jesse, in his ** Gleanings," describes the tree as he saw it : I can almost fancy it the very picture of death," he wrote. ** The hunter must have blasted it. It stretches out its bare and sapless branches, like the skeleton arms of some enormous giant, and is almost fearful in its decay. Among many appropriate passages which it brought to my recollection was the following : —
There want not many that do fear In deep of night to walk by this Heme's Oak.
Its spectral branches might indeed deter many from coming near it * twixt twelve and one.* " Hardby the oak he found a pit where Nan and her troop of fairies might have crouched, without being perceived by the ** fat Windsor stag " when he spoke like Heme the Hunter.
There is a part of Windsor Forest that might be called the Wood of the Queens, as it was beloved by Queen Victoria, Queen Charlotte and Queen Anne. (Queen Adelaide loved a particular view of Windsor Castle from the forest, and chose a particular beech to bear her name.) The story of Queen Anne*s Oak is that she was fond of hunting in the forest, and beneath this oak would mount her horse. Queen Charlottes favourite tree commands a view of the country round Maidenhead, and King George IV fixed a brass plate to it, bearing her name. (Another marked tree, in Binfield Wood, was Pope s Oak, with the words inscribed upon it, '* Here Pope sang.")
An old story tells how an oak, called Queen Victoria s, in Windsor Forest, was the pattern of Smeaton s edition of the Eddystone Lighthouse. He noted how its elasticity as well as its strength made it powerful to resist the wind ; how it rose from a swelling base by an elegant, concave curve, then formed a cylinder, which, after
WOODLAND TREES 57
rising awhile, became enlarged and swollen for the establishment of the boughs ; and so gained his idea of what the proper shape of a column should be, to secure the greatest stability. And his lighthouse, thus drawn from Nature, stood a hundred years without repairs, enduring from 1759 until 1877, when it was dismantled. There are Dool Oaks, Parliament Oaks, Gospel Oaks, Bull Oaks, Boundary Oaks, Groaning Oaks, and even Raining Oaks. An example of a Dool tree grew at Woburn Abbey, on whose branches the abbot and prior of Woburn and " other contumacious persons ' were hanged by order of Henry VIII. The tree was in perfect health in 1836, and bore an inscription opening with the lines :
Oh ! *Twas a ruthless deed ! enough to pale Freedom's bright fires, that doom'd to shameful death Those who maintain'd their faith with latest breath,
And scorn'd before the despot's frown to quail-
Bull Oaks are very old, hollow trees wherein bulls like to take shelter, backing into the cavity until their heads alone project in a fearsome manner : many of these exist. Boundary Oaks are such as the Border Oak on the confines of Shropshire and Wales, and the County Oak between Surrey and Sussex, or oaks on parish boundaries where boys were bumped and beaten, so that they should remember the parish bounds through all their days. The Pies tor Oak, described in White s ** Selborne,'* was a boundary tree in that it marked the extent of the ** Pleystow,** or play-place for the children, a tree ** surrounded with stone steps, and seats above them, the delight of old and young, and a place of much resort in summer evenings ; where the former sate in grave debate, while the latter frolicked and danced before them.*' Oaks, like the poplar, occasionally gain a reputation for producing rain, condensing moisture which falls as rain from the leaves. White, in his
Selborne/* mentions an oak which on a misty day would shed water so fast as to make puddles in the road below the branches, though the ground in general was dusty.
58 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
Professor Burnet, writing in 1829, worked out some extraordinary comparisons between oaks and other objects. He remarked that the circle occupied by the Cowthorpe Oak exceeds the ground-plot of the majestic column of which an oak was prototype, Smeaton*s Eddystone lighthouse. Sections of the trunk of the one would, at several heights, nearly agree with sections of the curved and cylindrical portions of the shaft of the other. The natural cavern m Damorys oak was by three feet larger than the parish church of St. Lawrence, in the Isle of Wight. Arthur's Round Table would form an entire roof for the lighthouse ; and upon that table might have been built a round church as large as St. Lawrence's, and, if the sap-wood had been saved, there would have been space for a cemetery as well. The ground plot of the Cowthorpe Oak was nine feet wider than a church to seat a hundred and twenty persons near London, and almost the same length within a few inches. The Duke's Walking-Stick, in Welbeck Park, was higher than the roof of Westminster Abbey. An oaken table in Dudley Castle, a single plank cut from the trunk of a local oak, measures longer than the bridge crossing the lake in Regent's Park, The famous roof of Westminster Hall, with a span among the greatest ever built without pillars, is little more than one-third the width of the Worksop Spread Oak (which dripped over an area of above half an acre, and would have sheltered a regiment of nearly a thousand horse). The branches of that oak would easily have reached over Westminster Hall. The rafters of the Hall have massive walls to support them : the tree's boughs were of sixteen feet more extent ; what then must be the strain of branches springing from a single column, spanning, from out- bough to out-bough, one hundred and eighty feet ?
As showing the enormous amount of timber produced by a single oak, a history of Northamptonshire records that one of the rooms in the house at Ashby Canons, 30 feet long and 20 feet wide, was entirely floored and wainscoted from a single oak. A tree known as the
WOODLAND TREES 59
Gelonas Oak was felled in Monmouthshire in 1810, and its timber was sold for the fabulous sum of £675. The bark alone, estimated to weigh six tons, fetched £200. Within its mighty trunk were four hundred rings of annual growth, and it contained 2,426 cubic feet of convertible timber. Five men were employed for twenty days, stripping and cutting down this tree ; and two sawyers were at work for five months in con- verting it, without losing a working day.
BEECH
Beech {Fagus sylvatica).
The beech, said White of Selbome, truly, " is the most lovely of all forest trees, whether we consider its smooth rind or bark, its glossy foliage, or graceful pendulous boughs." It vies with oak, ash, and chestnut, and no woodland tree excels it in grace, and few in vigour and hardiness.
The well-grown beech has a straight, pillared stem, smooth and grey, rising with lofty symmetry, sometimes a single column, sometimes double, uprearing against the sky a shapely canopy of freshest foliage. The thin, smooth bark is of olive-grey hue, with pleasing gradations of tone.
It is a tree of slow growth when young. In ten years from planting the seed, a young beech may reach a height of about 20 feet. When established it makes good progress, reaching its prime in from sixty to eighty years, by when it may have attained a height of 100 feet, with a trunk 6 feet in diameter ; it may thrive for another hundred years before decaying. The beech is not considered a native of Scotland, but Scotland boasts of one of the mightiest beeches in the world in the famous tree at Newbattle Abbey. When measured by John Loudon about a hundred years ago he found it to be nearly 90 feet high; in 1906, Mr. Elwes reckoned the height at 105 feet, while the girth of the bole at the ground exceeded 43 feet. The age was estimated at three hundred years. A taller tree, wonderfully graceful, by reason of its straight stem rising 80 feet or more before branching, is the Queen Beech in Ashridge Park, near Berkhampstead, whose height is certainly above 130 feet.
The leaves, before opening, are folded fan -wise, wrapped in a soft mantle of silvery down, in brown envelopes. When the tender, golden-green leaves emerge from their covering, they are fringed and lined with silky down. They are stipulate, stalked and smooth, the upper part very slightly toothed, thin in texture, pellucid when Summer is young, growing opaque as they mature, and of a deep, shining green which throws back the sun's rays, changing to orange-brown in Autumn.
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When the tree Is yet young, the leaves usually cling fast through the Winter until the sap rises In the next Spring, the leaves thus protecting the Autumn-born buds.
The flowers appear In April and May, upon the twigs of the current year. The male flowers occur in rounded pendent tassel-like groups ; each has four to seven floral leaves, and eight to twelve stamens. The female flowers form greenish, crowded erect groups, with purplish red stigmas, three to each flower, as in the oak ; they occur in pairs enclosed in a tough prickly cupule, which hardens as the fruit ripens, and presently splits, revealing the three-sided chestnut-hued nuts or mast. Seeds are borne at from forty to eighty years of age, but not every year. Apparently the tree stores up food for several seasons, and then expends it in the production of seed ; in consequence, in some years it is difficult to obtain beech mast, whilst in others it is very abundant.
The nuts were more appreciated in the olden days, as the specific name of the tree testifies — from phago, to eat.
The purple beech (Fagus syhatica, var. purpurea) is a variety discovered on the Continent towards the end of the eighteenth century, from which we have a deviation in our somewhat metallic-looking copper-coloured beech {Fagus syhatica, var. cuprea). The purple beech has its legend, telling how a party of brothers fell foul of one another, in a forest of Zurich ; three were slain, and from the blood- stained soil where they fell grew the first purple-leaved beeches. The leaves contain the usual green pigment, but it is masked by the presence of a red pigment. Although the plants produce fertile mast, yet the red pigmentation cannot usually be transmitted to the offspring from these seeds ; seedlings are mostly green, and of the ordinary beech type. Propagation is by means of cuttings.
THE BEECH TREE
Man, birds and beasts are beholden to the beech tree in many and pecuhar ways. Its name is symbol of one debt man owes, for the word, book, is traced to the Anglo- Saxon, heoce, or hoc, beech, from which we gather that our fathers wrote on beechen tablets. To speak of
the leaves " of a book is therefore appropriate : remembering that the foliage of papyrus was the first paper, and gave us that word ; and that ** folio * was derived from folium, a leaf. Elspecially are we beholden to the tree for its exceeding beauty, in May, when the green-gold leaves shine as with an inner light, those glossy leaves that throw back the sun's rays, and give a cooler shade than any other tree ; and in October, when the leaves turn from copper and bronze to fox-red. A well-grown beech ranks among the stateliest and most handsome of all our trees, with its tall, massive, straight trunk, with smooth, shining, silvery-grey bark, towering to a great height, wide-spreading umbrageous branches, and symmetrically domed crown. It is the Adonis of our Sylva, though that title which some lovers of beeches have given it rings perhaps falsely, for the beech is more like a goddess. The scientific forester has hit upon a fitter name — the Mother of Forests. A poet, whose songs have made music in our age (** Songs of the Open Road ' — Teresa Hooley) pleads for the femininity of the beech ; so soft, so suave are its contours, so dignified its loveliness, whether clothed in the translucent foliage of Spring, or standing, in Winter, in the beauty of stark, silver curves. George Macdonald, in his romance ** Phantastes,'* portrays the beech as a woman, a ** White Lady ** who saved a man from the malice of an ash. And the singer of the songs of the road bestows upon the beech a new name — " *The Madonna of the Wood,' gracious, beautiful, tender — shelter to the little wild
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things, and to the weary heart of man, comfort and peace.**
The beech is called *' The Mother of Forests," and *' The Doctor of Forests ' for many reasons, as that it makes soil fertile by its leaf-mould, its abundant leaves speedily promoting the perfection of humus for trees, as they tend to lie where they fall. The beech also is extraordmanly tolerant of shade, and these qualities make it the best of trees for under- planting, so that foresters grow beech under oak, and it flourishes in the oak's shade. Its own shade keeps down other plants, and checks evaporation from the soil.
One must go into the deeps of such great beech forests as cover the Chilterns to feel the full sense of the brilliantly vivid and fresh greenery. What the poet meant by naming April ** Proud, pied April * is clear in the cathedral-like aisles of those woods, when the trees, in their hesitating way, are breaking into verdure, with here a small spray of greenery on a tree, there, a whole branch in leaf, but one alone, and small trees in their parents* shade fully clad in April's livery. The pied effect of the verdure against the prevailing brown tones suggests green veils hanging out to dry. The leaves are translucent ; their silvery fringes seem to aid in detaming the sunshme. Embosomed in a thicket of young beech, we see the force of the line of Coleridge :
The level sunshine glimmers with green light;
Beeches do not gladly suffer other plants in their shade, but wild orchids may hold their own, anemones, primroses, and the dainty wood-sorrel, which will often grow from the pocket of an old stem. In Sussex beech- woods, in the St. Leonards Forest district, wild daffodils dance m myriads, to be succeeded by many myriads more of bluebells. Later, the floor may be covered by drifts of the curious plant, wood sanicle, with decorative leaves and minute white flowers ; and the wild straw- berries ripen for woodland children of all sorts.
64 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
BEECH TREE : BASE OF TRUNK
Evelyn's praise of the cool of beech tree shade holds good : ** most refreshing to the weary shepherd — lentus in umbray echoing Amaryllis with his oaten pipe/* To pass, in the dog-days, from some open sun-drenched downland into a beechen hanger is truly like entering the peace of a cathedral. The light is subdued among the tall, grey stems, rising to their green canopy, and all is silent save for the droning of humble-bees, returning, some a little tipsily, from the thyme-bed, the call-notes of foraging parties of titmice, and now and then an exultant laugh from a green woodpecker, or the sound that the children sing about — so pleasantly associated with beechen glades : — ** The woodpecker tapping the hollow beech tree." The ancients supposed the shade of the beech to be as wholesome as that of the walnut was harmful.
Others praise the comfort of the high, exposed roots of the tree as places for resting and dreaming. This amusing passage is culled from a little book of the mid- days of the last century, ** Our Woodlands " :
** Well do we remember how, in our school-boy days when first set down to puzzle out the Pastorals of Virgil, our imagination dwelt on the tantalizing allusion to * beechen -shades,' in the well-known,
Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi,
till we would almost have exchanged persons with even an old classic party like Tityrus, to be in the beechwoods
WOODLAND TREES 65
too, instead of that hot, close school-room ; with a mossy turf beneath, and the flickering, green leaves, the squirrel, and the birds above us, in lieu of the hard form and low cracked ceiling that were our seat and canopy. Thus mentally wandering in woodland dreams — our real bucolic business has eke been forgotten — till, instead of awaking to find ourselves under beechen boughs, we were, perchance, aroused to duty by the twigs of a less pleasant tree, to wit, the birch, waving over us with a dismal hiss/* Dryden thus translates the familiar passage :
Beneath the shade which beechen boughs diffuse. You, Tityrus, entertain your sylvan muse ; Round the wide world in banishment we roam, Forced from our pleasing fields and native home. While stretch'd at ease you sing your happy loves. And Amaryllis fills the shady groves.
Thomas Gray's description of the beeches of Burnham Forest, those ** venerable vegetables,'* as he calls them, comes to mind : ** At the foot of one of these squats me, (// penseroso) " ; he would " grow to a trunk " for a whole morning. The friendly old beech may tempt any man, on a May morning, to lie in the chair of its high roots, more comfortable even than the homely Windsor chair the tree may some day yield, and, like the poet, watch the timorous hare and sportive squirrel gambolling around him, as, he suggested, they may have gambolled round Adam in Paradise, before he had an Eve. ** Gray's beech " became an object of veneration :
There at the foot of yonder nodding beech,
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high. His listless length at noontide he would stretch.
And pore upon the brook that babbled by.
Those beeches of Burnham are the most remarkable of their kind in the world, since through having suffered the chopping off of their heads they seem to have been endowed with a length of life far surpassing their allotted span. Their age may be six or seven hundred years, whereas the normal span of a beech's life, if it be not beheaded, is a hundred and fifty to a hundred more years.
66 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
If pollarded at intervals of a generation, and lopped at intervals, its life, it seems, may be prolonged indefinitely. The old beeches of this forest have taken on all manner of strange, distorted shapes, and are so gnarled, so wrinkled in their skins, as to suggest prehistoric monsters : dragons of the wood.
Some authorities, including mighty Caesar, have doubted if the beech be a native tree, and this although no woodland tree grows more readily from seed, or thrives more willingly on our soil. Caesar remarked that timber of every kind which was found in Gaul grew also in Britain, except beech and silver fir ; but Caesar was a hasty surveyor, and modern opinion holds that it is a true native of Southern Britain.
Some of the finest beeches of England grow in the New Forest, and there are many noble trees in the Sussex forest regions ; whereby hangs a tale of St. Leonard, who dwelt in the forest that bears his name. The saint delighted in reposing in the beeches' shade, but often was disturbed during the day by vipers, and at night by the singing of the nightingales. He prayed that the annoyances might cease, and so well he prayed that since his time, in that forest, as a Sussex proverb runs :
The viper has ne'er been known to sting. Or the nightingale e'er heard to sing.
In the great beechwoods of Buckinghamshire to this day the old craft of one locally known as ** the bodger *' still flourishes, the man who, on a primitive lathe, set up in a little hut, turns the legs and spindles of Windsor chairs. A few cottage craftsmen may still make beechen bowls after the old fashion — the fashion of Virgils shepherds in the golden age :
No wars did men molest, When only beechen bowls were in request.
Milton, too, hymned the cooling bowl :
In beechen goblets let their bev'rage shine, Cool from the crystal spring their sober wine.
Buckinghamshire beeches are rarely of great size, but form a valuable crop. Some years ago, in a lawsuit
WOODLAND TREES 67
concerning a West Wycombe estate, the estate books showed that for over a hundred years the annual income from the beechwoods was thirty shilHngs an acre, the woods covering land which would not be worth five shillings an acre for agriculture. They are kept up by natural reproduction, and so long as chair-making goes on in the district, are likely to keep their value. An old Buckinghamshire proverb runs : '* Cut a beech, and have a beech.'*
Squirrels love the beechwoods ; the smooth stems give them an easy ascent, the great limbs a commodious resting-place, and the pockets of the roots provide caches for their Winter stores. Cowper associated the squirrel with the beech in pleasant lines, describing how on a Winter day he comes from his bed of matted leaves in the hollow of an elm, to frisk awhile :
Flippant, pert, and full olf play ;
He sees me, and at once, swift as a bird,
Ascends the neighbouring beech ; there whisks his brush.
And perks his ears, and stamps, and cries aloud.
With all the prettiness of feigned alarm.
And anger insignificantly fierce.
Beech has ever yielded famous wood for bowls, buckets, trenchers and chairs, and the best handles for many tools. In the days before cast-iron it was used for wheels, pinions and cogs.
The timber, if of small repute compared to the oak's, is marvellously enduring under water. Winchester Cathedral, the story goes, was built on piles of beechwood driven into a peaty marsh by the Normans, and when recently examined, seven hundred years after the Lady Chapel was erected on this foundation, the piles were found still sound to the heart's core. The timber has found favour for building keels of ships, flood-gates and sluices, and especially for the making of the homely Windsor chair. In France, the wood lends itself to the making of the peasants' homely sabots. Before coal was, beech yielded the best charcoal, and Buckinghamshire beechen wood has been charred in quantities for gun- powder. As a wood for fuel, beech burns hotly, with a
68
THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
clear flame, and it burns almost as well when green as when dry ; its merits as firewood are unrivalled.
Then the beech makes a capital hedge, giving good shelter when trimmed closely, especially m Winter, since the brown leaves refuse to part from the stems. About Ghent and Antwerp, young beeches are commonly planted for hedges, so that they cross each other, trellis- fashion, being united by osiers.
WEEPING BEECH
Beechwoods yield fungi in variety, including the truffle, precious to epicures, and the morel, and others which grow on the trees* trunks in Autumn.
Our fathers would stuff mattresses with beech-leaves, as the Highlander spreads his bed of heather. The leaves, said old Evelyn, ** afford the best and easiest mattresses
WOODLAND TREES 69
in the world to lay under our quilts, instead of straw.** The leaves remain sweet for five or six years. Lauder, commenting on Evelyn's saying, and speaking of the excellence of the beds in Italy (made of mattresses filled with the spathe of the Indian corn) remarks, ** But the beds made of beech leaves are really no whit behind them in their qualities, while the fragrant smell of green tea which the leaves retain is most gratifying." He waived aside a possible objection in the slight crackling noise of the leaves as an uneasy sleeper tosses or turns.
A kindly, friendly tree is the beech, well loved in return. Multitudes of creatures revel in the beechmast. In Autumn, a cloud of pigeons may be put out from one tree. Rooks and jays are devoted pensioners ; pheasants pick up the mast as it falls, and the little titmice crack it open, on the tree, with relish. Deer and pig, squirrel, badger, and mice enjoy the nourishing food. Some cunning housewives may still make cakes of the beechnuts, though they were better left for the enjoyment of deer, and such small deer as the merry little rodents, for as Gerard, the botanist, said, " With them mice and squirrels be greatly delighted.'* In extreme old age, a noble beech, once a monarch of the woods, may like the oak, do a last service as a cave for the roosting owls.
The frugal French people have long known how to express an oil from the nuts, for use in lamps and for cooking, an oil supposed to be scarcely inferior to the best olive oil — the ** Arboretum Britannicum ** gives the recipe for its preparation.
The smooth and tender grey surface of the beech*s bark ever has invited the wandering lover to carve thereon the name of his adored, illustrated with cuts in the style of art which has ever been in vogue with victims of sentiment, like Orlando, the culprit of Rosalind's speech : ** There is a man haunts a forest, that abuses our young trees with carving Rosalind on their barks." Jacques gave him good advice, in praying him to mar no more trees by his love-songs.
70 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
Campbell, in his appeal to the woodman to ** spare the tree," remmds him of the many long-forgotten names carved on the trunk by lovers :
As Love's own altar, honour me.
Spare, woodman, spare the beechen tree*
Irresistible, indeed, is the temptation of the smooth bark to the rustic carver ; whence the poets lines :
Not a beech but bears some cypher, Tender word or amorous text.
Virgil referred also to this :
Or shall I rather the sad verse repeat Which, on the beech's bark I lately writ ?
Twenty-five centuries before Rosalinds day lived Paris (" as beauteous as a god "), bred among old Priam's shepherds, to desert for Helen his playmate, (Enone, who wrote her tender epistles, preserved by Ovid, reminding him of the happy days when he carved her name on the beeches : ** The beeches still preserve my name, carved by your hand, and * (Enone,* the work of your pruning-knife, is read upon their bark. As the trunks increase, the letters still dilate ; they grow and rise as testimonies of my just claim upon your love ! "
COMMON ASH TREE
Ash Tree {Fraxinus excelsior).
The ash is a native of this country, as of most of Europe, a tree of the order Oleacece, to which privets, olives and lilacs belong, trees and shrubs whose leaves are opposite.
It reaches a height of from 30 to 100 feet ; an exceptional ash at Cobham, Kent, was found to be 146 feet high, and more than twelve feet in girth. The bark remains smooth for upwards of forty years.
The leaves, late in unfolding and early in dropping, are pinnately compound ; the black buds, with a coating of black hairs, are a notable feature.
Flowers are borne at from about thirty years.
Bisexual, male and female flowers may occur on the same tree. They appear before the leaves open, in crowded groups, which appear nearly black on account of the dark-coloured stamens and stigmas. The male flowers are naked, with two stamens, the female flowers have a poorly developed calyx and a two-chambered superior ovary. When present, the bisexual flowers are naked, with two stamens, and an ovary. Pollination is by means of the wind, and the fruits are winged ; although the ovary is two-chambered, only one seed forms in each fruit, the other aborting ; the wing is a development of the wall of the fruit, and aids in dispersal. The fruits may remain on the tree through Winter.
In the manna ash {Fraxinus Ornus) which is sometimes met with in cultivation, there is a white, four-membered corolla, of long, narrow, united petals.
The botanical name, ** Fraxinus,'* is variously and unsatisfactorily explained, as being derived from phrasso, to enclose, the ash being a hedge-plant, and from phrasis^ a separation, from the ease with which the wood splits, or from frangitur, from the young branches being easily broken.
** Weeping ashes ** are occasionally seen ; one at Elvaston Castle, near Derby, is nearly 100 feet high, its branches hanging to a length of about 70 feet. A few adorn London.
71
THE ASH TREE
Nature seems t'ordain The rocky cliff for the wild ash's reign.
Dryden's Virgil.
The ash has been happily named, ** Venus of the Woods/* and has a pecuHar beauty of its own, with its tall, ash-grey stem, and its way of branching so charac- teristic that when leafless it may be picked out from afar in a landscape as readily as a poplar. There is a certain austerity about the boughs and their sprays ; they lack the bushiness and twigginess of oak or elm. Gilpin, in his ** Forest Scenery,'' minutely describes the manner of the branching, and remarks quaintly, ** The ash never contracts the least disgusting formality." He points to a difference between the spray of the oak and of the ash ; the oak's spray seldom shoots from the under-sides of the branches, which keeps them in a horizontal form ; the spray of the ash does so break out from the under- sides, and so ** forms very elegant pendent boughs." When in foliage, the leaves, with their leaflets in pairs, clad the tree in a light, and feathery grace. It is a tree of many high virtues ; and, as Spenser said, ** for nothing ill." ** Excelsior," Linnaeus named it, from its aspiring height.
Virgil paid tribute to its gracefulness in the line,
Fraxinus in sylvis pulcherrlma.
The ash carries its main stem higher than the oak ; with its leaves swaying gracefully in the breeze, it pleases the eye with its easy outline, and air of lightness.
The thick, fibrous roots creep away horizontally far from the trunk, and as they come near the surface give small chance for other vegetation in the tree's shade. The ** drip " of the ash is sometimes held to be harmful to other plants, but the roots in marshes may be useful
72
WOODLAND TREES 73
as drains. Hence the proverb, ** May your footfall be by the root of an ash," meaning, may your footing be sure. The far-spreading habits of the roots, giving firm anchorage to the tree, with its great leaves, against the winds, has cost the ash the friendship of gardeners.
In mythology and literature the tree holds a high place. Carlyle wrote finely about its mythology among the Norsemen : '* All life is figured by them as a tree. Igdrasil, the ash-tree of existence, has its roots deep down in the kingdoms of Hela, or Death ; its trunk reaches up heaven high, spreads its boughs over the whole universe : it is the Tree of Existence. At the foot of it, in the Death kingdom, sit three Nomas (Fates) — the Past, Present, Future — watering its roots from the Sacred Well. Its boughs, with their buddings and dis-leafings — events, things suffered, things done, catastrophes — stretch through all lands and times."
The northern story is that an eagle rests on the mystic tree, watching all things in the world, while a squirrel for ever runs up and down, making reports. Streams of knowledge of things past and of things to come flow from its roots. And man was made from the sacred ash wood.
An old ballad runs :
Oh, it's hame and it's hame, at hame I fain would be,
Hame, lads, hame in the North Countrie ; Oh, the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree.
They a' flourish best in the North Countrie.
And the north claims some of our finest ashes. They love a moist site and rich loam, are lovers especially of streamsides, but often crown some craggy crest, or a crumbling ruin, whither the light seed was borne by the wind.
Nobly the ash sets off a wild scene, as Strutt noted in his ** Sylva." ** It is,** he wrote, ** in mountain scenery that the ash appears to peculiar advantage, waving its slender branches over some precipice which just affords it soil sufficient for its footing, or springing between crevices of rocks ; a happy emblem of the hardy spirit
74 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
which will not be subdued by fortune's scantiness. It is likewise a lovely object by the side of some crystal stream, in which it views its elegant, pendent foliage, bending, Narcissus-like, over its own charms/*
Ash wood is famous for burning as hotly when green as when dry, whence the saying :
Bum ash-wood green, 'Tis fit for a queen.
The leaf-buds, leaves and flowers compel attention, and the buds and leaves have their place in poetry and folklore. The blackness of the short oval buds caught Tennyson's attention, and in ** The Gardener's Daughter " he describes Juliet's eyes as ** Darker than darkest pansies," and her hair as ** More black than ash-buds in the front of March." Thinking of the late leafing of the ash — later than any tree's — he notes how :
The tender ash delays To clothe herself when all the woods are green.
She may delay even until June, but before the foliage escapes from the black bud-scales, the vinous clusters of the flowers burst forth, flowers with neither petals nor sepals, the stamens and pistils being borne by the same or by different flowers, and either sort, or but one, may be found on one tree — together with bisexual flowers. Later follow the hanging clusters of the fruits, called ** keys " from their appearance, the ** samareis," which turn from green to black. Evelyn says that in old days they were pickled when green ** as a delicate salading." This fruit is yielded from the fortieth to the fiftieth year onward. The keys have a twist to their wing so that they spin in the wind, and often fly to take their chance of life among rocks or on walls. In July, Venus appears fully draped in graceful leaves, with from four to seven pairs of tapered leaflets, with a single leaf at the tip. The feather-like foliage is of somewhat dull green, but lends itself to a delicate play of light. New beauty touches the ash for awhile in Autumn, if it happens that the leaves cling long enough to the
WOODLAND TREES 75
tree to turn to a clear lemon hue ; but they fall early, and the first frost brings down Venus*s robes. This brought a word of censure on the ash from Lauder : ** Ash trees should be sparingly planted around a gentle- man s residence, to avoid the risk of their giving to it a cold, late appearance, at a season when all nature should smile/* In weather-lore there are many versions of the rhyme declaring that if the ash comes into leaf before the oak, we may expect a soak, as there are many versions of charms referring to what is called the * even-ash," presumably a leaf with an even number of leaflets. The Yorkshire maid who wished to dream of her husband would put an even-ash spray beneath her pillow, uttering the cryptic incantation :
Even-ash, even-ash, I pluck thee.
This night my own true love to see ;
Neither In his rick nor in his rare.
But in the clothes he does every day wear.
Another bit of folk-lore about the ash is that a calamity will befall the Crown in a year when the ash produces no ** locks and keys.**
In superstitious lore, the ash was accorded wonderful virtues. Pliny advised the uses of an extract of the ash as a cure for snake bites, stating also that he himself had proved how a snake would prefer to creep into flames rather than cross a circle of ash-leaves. The sage, John Evelyn, remarked, ** There is extracted an oil from the ash which is excellent to recover the hearing,** adding, that for toothache the anointing of the offending teeth therewith is most sovereign.
In an old Highland custom the ash was impressed into service after the birth of a child, the nurse putting one end of a green ash-stick into the fire, gathering the sap, as it oozed, in a spoon, and administering this as the first spoonful of food to the new-born — who thus drank of the tree of life.
Gilbert White tells one story of the ash in superstition in describing the ** shrew-ash ** at Selborne, an ash whose twigs, applied to cattle, would relieve their pains.
76 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
caused by having been over-run by a shrew-mouse. The shrew-ash was made by the horrible plan of burying a mouse alive in a tree. ** As to that on the Plestor,*' wrote the sage of Selborne,
" The late vicar stubb'd and burnt it,
when he was way- warden, regardless of the remon- strances of the bystanders, who interceded in vain for its preservation, urging its power and efficiency, and alleging that it had been
Religione patrum multos servata per annos. — With reverential awe preserved for years."
A footnote to " Selborne ** mentions that shrews were supposed of old to be particularly injurious to horses, and quotes this note from an old natural history : ** When a horse in the fields happened to be suddenly seized with anything like a numbness in his legs, he was immediately judged by the old persons to be either planet-struck, or shrew-struck. The mode of cure which they prescribed, and which they considered in all cases as infallible, was to drag the animal through a piece of bramble that grew at both ends.'*
The remains of a shrew-ash still stand in Richmond Park, a tree beneath which Queen Elizabeth is supposed to have rested. This tree is linked to another super- stition, described by Evelyn, that ruptured children could be cured by being passed through a cleft made in the stem of an ash ; at least, there was a sign of the cure when the cleft in the tree closed and healed. Gilbert White also referred to this, describing one row of ashes he knew, showing by their long seams and scars how they had been cleft asunder for the charm in olden days : ** We have several persons now living in the village, he related, in a letter dated 1776, '* who, in their child- hood, were supposed to be healed by this superstitious ceremony, derived down perhaps from our Saxon ancestors who practised it before their conversion to Christianity.** According to a note in Brand's
WOODLAND TREES 77
** Antiquities," as late as the year 1833 a child was drawn through a cleft ash-tree on the borders of Dartmoor. It was considered that for the cure to be effective, the child should be washed for three mornings in the dew from the leaves of the charmed tree.
The Greeks and Romans knew the value of the sapling ash for a spear, as we appreciate the wood for staff or stick. Homer tells us that the spear of Achilles had an ashen shaft. So were Cupids arrows made of the wood. The Saxon name for the ash was *' aesc,'* from their word for spear. The Scots particularly honour the ash, and it made the staves for their favourite weapon, the pike : was not the freedom of Scotland won by the ashen pike-shafts of Bruce*s pikemen at Bannockburn ? In the latter days of the sixteenth century James VI re-enacted an older statute calling upon all landowners to plant trees, the ash often being the chosen tree, as witness the many old ashes still standing about farm- houses, or testifying to their ancient sites.
We have no tree with tougher or more elastic, flexible wood. Authority says that at four years* growth the wood is fit for a staff, at nine for a tool's handle, and when but three inches in diameter it is as mature for timber and as durable as the wood of much older trees. The wood is prized whenever elasticity and toughness are demanded — as for Staffordshire crates, the coopers hoops, or Kentish hop-poles, for the spokes and felloes of wheels, axle-trees, parts of farm-wagons, tables, chairs and benches, ladders, oars, alpenstocks, billiard cues, or the buts for fishing-rods. The old-fashioned milk-pail was made by rolling thin boards of ash into hollow cylinders.
An ash may live for two hundred years, but the timber merchant is likely to cast covetous eyes on it before it reaches a hundred years and begins to decay, turning black at the heart. Except poplar and willow, no hard- wood tree matures quicker.
The foliage and young shoots of pollarded trees yield fodder for sheep and red deer. It is an old country
78 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
idea that if cows eat the leaves their milk becomes flavoured.
Like all our native trees the ash has left its mark on our maps, and many place-names tell of the tree — such as Ashby, Ashndge, or Ascot. The various Gaelic names for the tree, such as ** fuinnsean,*' are reflected in such names as that of the River Puncheon, in Cork.
SWEET CHESTNUT
Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa).
This chestnut is of the family of the oak and beech, a native of Southern Europe, North Africa, Asia Minor, and Northern Persia.
It may live about five hundred, possibly a thousand, years.
It rears itself to a height of 60 or 90 feet, occasionally to above 100 feet ; and the stem may be twelve feet in diameter.
The branches spread horizontally, bending downwards and sometimes sweeping the earth.
The stem is very distinctive, in old trees often assuming a twisted look, the surface marked with deep, wide longitudinal clefts.
The leaves are elliptical, some ten inches long, their edges toothed ; from a rich green they turn to pale yellow, deep gold, and brown in Autumn.
The flowers appear in early Summer, in ascending cylindrical yellow catkin-like inflorescences, some six inches long. The male flowers occur in groups in the axils of bracts, and are conspicuous by reason of their anthers ; they occupy the greater part of the inflorescence, whilst at the base, groups of greenish female flowers may occur (but may be absent). The male flowers have from nine to twelve long stamens, and a rudimentary pistil, with a yellowish floral envelope ; the female have reddish stigmas, often occur in threes, and the group is surrounded, as in the closely-related oak and beech, by a prickly cupule, which in the fruit stage splits into four valves, and exposes the nuts. Although each female flower may contain twelve ovules, usually all but one abort, so that each flower gives but one nut.
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THE SWEET CHESTNUT
Hail, old patrician tree, so great and good I Hail, ye plebeian underwood.
Where the poetic birds rejoice. And for their quiet nests, and plenteous food.
Pay with grateful voice.
Cowley.
The history of the sweet or Spanish chestnut is somewhat vague. The story goes that we owe this fine tree to the Romans, and it is possible that they raised the trees from the fruit which they brought for food. To this day the peasants of Italy (and of Spain) grind the nuts into flour, for cakes and pottage ; excellent and wholesome fare. It seems clear that it was known before the Conquest, as there are very early references to it as the ** cyst-beam,'' or ** chesten,** — from the Latin Castanea : witness Chaucer's list of trees, such as made up an English wood in the fourteenth century :
As oke, firre, birche, aspe, elder, elme, poplere. Willow, holm, plane, boxe, chesten, laure, Maple, thorne, beche, awe, hasel, whipultre. How they were felde shall not be tolde by me.
(The plane was doubtless the sycamore ; the whipultre may have been the ash.)
Shakespeare knew the tree or its fruit, we may suppose from the cryptic lines in '* Macbeth " :
A sailor's wife had chestnuts in her lap.
And mounched and mounched and mounched.
" Give me," quoth I. " Aroint thee, witch ! " the rump-fed ronyon cries.
The curious expression, ** Aroint thee, witch ! " has been supposed by some students of Shakespeare and of botany to stand for *' A rowan-tree witch," an illusion to the association of the rowan-tree with witches ; but Professor Skeat cast cold water upon this plausible notion.
Shakespeare may have had the Spanish chestnut in mind when he made fair Rosalind say, ** T faith,
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SWEET CHESTNUT
82 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
his hair is of good colour,** and CeHa retort, ** An excellent colour ; your chestnut was ever the only colour. '
Ben Jonson speaks of ** the chestnut whilk hath larded many a swine."
Old writers show that the sweet chestnut was not common m their day. The writer of the tract, ** An Old Thrift Newly Revived," published in 1612, recom- mends the chestnut ** as a kind of timber tree, of which few grow m England, which not only produces large and good timber, but good fruit that poor people in time of dearth may with a small quantity of oats or barley make bread of. When you begin first to plant it," he adds, ** it will grow more in one yeare than an oake will doe m two."
The timber of young chestnuts may almost hold its own with that of oak, and is much favoured for palings and gates. An old-time use was for making wine-casks, and the wood was believed to be especially friendly to wine :
Close-grain'd chestnut, wood of sov'reign use. For casking up the grapes' most powerful juice.
England long boasted ** The Great Chestnut of Tortworth," in Gloucester, of which Evelyn remarked, it was famed for its magnitude in the reign of King Stephen. Strutt, in his ** Sylva Britannica," in 1820, gave its measurement at five feet from the ground, as fifty-two feet in circumference.
This is the tree which adorns so many of the land- scapes of Salvator Rosa, who never tired of painting it in all its moods, as David MacWhirter never flagged in his homage to the silver birch. In Salvator s favourite mountains of Calabria the chestnut abounded, and he knew and painted it in all its thousands of beautiful shapes.
Most famous of all chestnut trees was ** The Chestnut of the Hundred Horses " — {Castagna di cento cavalli) of Mount Etna. It was so-called, its legend runs, because Queen Jean of Aragon once sheltered under
WOODLAND TREES 83
its branches with a cavalcade a hundred strong. To say, as a seventeenth century traveller did, that an entire flock of sheep might be folded in its hollow interior is to give a poor idea of its size, depending on one's idea of a flock of sheep. Another traveller tells how a house had been formed m the interior, in which a family lived, having an oven wherein they dried their chestnuts, using the tree itself for their fuel. An account of the tree was given by a traveller, Brydone, who toured Sicily in 1 770, and remarked that so famous was the tree that it was marked on a hundred-year-old map. He gave the measurement as ** two hundred and four feet round,*' and remarked that if the five trunks ever grew united in one solid stem it was deservedly styled the wonder of the vegetable world, and the glory of the forest.
Lauder told of the grandeur of the chestnut forests in Italy, and how he roamed for miles through their high-roofed leafy shades, and once, in a forest stretching for five miles up the Vallombrosan Apennine, took part in a holiday festival of peasants, who were sporting and dancing in a glade. He describes the scene as one of the most interesting he ever beheld : ** Some were beating down the chestnuts with sticks ; others, for their own refreshment, were picking out the contents from the palisadoed castles in which the kernels lie entrenched ; and when newly gathered from the tree, nothing can be more sweet or pleasing to the palate : while others, and particularly the girls, were carrying on an amusing warfare of love by pelting one another with the fruit." The girls, in the national costumes, at their play in the chestnut grove, seem to have caught the traveller's special fancy ; they were as if they had abandoned civilized luxuries and returned to their pristine simplicity of fare, to habits of days when the innocency of their lives corresponded with their rustic nutriment. ** It seemed as if the golden age had been restored." The passage gives point to those lines of Milton which one day, quoted by the orator in Parliament,
84 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
startled and enchanted honourable members by their beauty, and the aptness of the simile :
Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks In Vallombrosa.
The name, chestnut, is traced to the Latin name Castanea through its French form, and the Romans named it, the story goes, from a town in Thessaly named Kastanum, where the trees flourished, but possibly they gave their original name to the town.
The chief use we find for the fruit is for the stuffing of turkeys ; in Italy it may serve for potatoes or flour. Evelyn lamented, " We give that fruit to our swine in England which is amongst the delicacies of Princes in other countries, and is a lusty and masculine food for rusticks at all times, and of better nourishment for husbandmen than cole and rusty bacon, yea, or beans to boot.** Milton has the lines :
While hisses on my hearth the pulpy pear, And black'ning chestnuts start and crackle there.
On the Continent, the nuts are prepared in a variety of ways. After being ground into flour, and mixed with milk and salt, the eggs and butter, they make a thick girdle-cake, called ** la galette,'* and another preparation is ** polenta," made by boiling the nuts in milk, a kind of porridge. The French love chestnuts, boiled or roasted, or as marrons glaces ; and their roasting is a fine art, brought to perfection, too, by pedlars in the London streets in Winter. A three-hundred years' old writer remarks on this point, wisely, ** Unless the shell be first cut the chestnuts skip suddenly with a cracke out of the fire while they be roasting.** The French, therefore, on roasting a quantity, slit the skin of all save one ; when this skips with a crack, the rest are done to a turn.
An epigram of Martial *s runs :
For chestnuts, roasted by a gentle heat, No city can the learned Naples beat.
BIRCHES
Silver Birch (Betula alba).
We have in this country two forms of the birch, the silver birch (B. alba) so named from the silver bark ornamenting parts of the trunk, and B. pubescens, which is commoner and less attractive, and is named from its young shoots being clothed with down, lacking in those of the other form (which is also named B. verrucosa, from its young shoots usually being studded with resinous verrucce, or warts). The silver birch is distinguished from the other by its long, hanging branchlets, and may be described as the daintiest and most graceful, the lightest and airiest, of all our trees, while it is among the hardiest, growing everywhere.
We have also a dwarf birch, B. nana, an insignificant shrub of the Highlands.
The birch varies from a shrub-like form to a tree 50 and more feet high, with a girth of two to three feet. It is a short-lived tree, maturing in about fifty years.
It has the habit of peeling its bark ; much of the silver birch's bark is of a beautiful silver, and of exquisite silky texture ; at the base it may be coarse, rugged, and blackish. The bark of the common birch may be brown.
The branches of the silver birch are attenuated and drooping.
The leaves are small, and hang loosely, constantly fluttering, glossy, leathery, varying from a triangular shape to a pointed oval, with toothed edges ; they appear as if cut across at their base.
The hanging catkins are seen in Autumn, in the following Spring maturing, and turning crimson. The female flower is a short, slender, erect spike, a green catkin, and develops into a little oblong cone, having minute winged fruits.
Fantastic growths, known as "Witches' brooms,** often occur on birch, and occur also on elm, cherry and other trees. They appear as crowded masses of smedl twigs, which usually corac into kaf
85
86 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
before the rest of the twigs, and seldom bear flowers. These curious growths may be due to the attacks of mites, giving an effect comparable to the mossy galls of the rose, but on a much greater scale, but in the birch a fungus (Exoascus betulinus) is usually responsible ; it lives in the twigs, and by its presence stimulates the abnormal growth which was formerly attributed to the malignancy of witches.
LADY OF THE WOODS
Most beautiful Of forest trees — the Lady of the Woods.
This was the poet Coleridge's happy description of the dainty silver birch, so exquisite in colour and in form. The bark has been described as one of Nature s masterpieces, the smooth silver layers contrasting with the rugged texture near the ground. At all seasons the Lady of the Woods is charming, in Summer, when the little triangular leaves, so light in the mass, wave like green tresses; in Autumn, when turned to yellow, and in Winter, when the sun touches the silver stem, and she displays all the delicacy of the tracery of her drooping sprays. Perhaps it is especially in Winter, when the denizens of the woods have denuded themselves, like the goddesses before Paris on Mount Ida, that the symmetry, the whiteness and the queenly figure, are brought out in their incom- parable perfection.
It grows everywhere throughout our islands, from the Highlands to London's commons. It abounds through Northern Europe ; in Lapland, says one authority, it is found barely two thousand feet below the line of eternal snow, and eight hundred feet above the line of the Scots pine. Nothing could be added on this point to what Evelyn said, that the land where it will grow
cannot well be too barren ; for it will thrive both in the dry, and the wet, sand and stony, marshes and bogs ; the water-falls, and uliginous parts of Forests that hardly bear any grass, do many times spontaneously produce it in abundance whether the place be high, or low, and nothing comes amiss to it."
Fancy has played variously over the origin of the names, birch and birk : some say, from betUj the Celtic name, others from the Latin, batuere, to beat, in allusion to
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88 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
the birch-rods of the Roman Hctors, with which they drove back the crowd on occasions of processions.
Merediths pen, that played so lovingly with images of trees, traced these words about the silver birch, as an image of the ** damty rogue in porcelain,** of her figure and her walking, and her dress that embraced her shape, and fluttered loose about it in the spirit of a Summer's day, so that she was spoken of as Calypso-clad : ** See the silver birch in a breeze : here it swells, there it scatters and it is puffed to a round and it streams like a pennon, and now gives the glimpse and shine of the white stems line within, now hurries over it, denying that it was visible, with a chatter along the sweeping folds, while still the white peeps through.** Scott, too, humanized the birch :
Where weeps the birch with silver bark. And long dishevelled hair.
The birch is the camper's greatest friend among the trees, since nothing can equal the bark as kindling-wood, and it may be rolled to make a blazing and long-enduring torch. It is esteemed by the tanner, and a fragrant oil the tree yields is credited with giving Russian leather its distinctive odour. The bark is strong to endure, and in Sweden is used as a thatch : nothing could be more beautiful.
SILVER BIRCH
WOODLAND TREES 89
Among the old-time uses of the wood were the making of the husbandman's ox-yokes; of hoops, panniers, brooms, wands, and bavins ; and, strange to say, ** the grounds of our Gallants Sweet-Powdery'* in Evelyn's phrase ; to say nothing of the *' fasces " borne by the ** lictors,' or the rods of our own tyrannical pedagogues. Gerard says the branches of the birch ** serve well to the decking up of houses and banquetting roomes for places of pleasure, and beautifying the streetes in the Crosse, or Gang, Week, and such like." He adds, *' Schoolmasters and parents do terrify their children with rods made of birch." To-day, the wood, not very durable, is used for gunpowder and as staves for herring-barrels, and especially for making reels or bobbins for thread factories.
Loudon gives a wonderful list of the birch's uses ; for furniture and cooperage, for cups and bowls, for torches — made of the bark by Highlanders — for charcoal, and for sandals, the Russians making the bark of the smaller trees into boots and shoes. Reindeer skins, he says, are tanned by being steeped in a decoction of birch spray, in which woollen stuffs are dyed yellow. The Finlanders use the leaves as tea ; the Kamtschatkans ground the inner bark to mix it with oatmeal ; the Russians turn the sap into beer, wine, and vinegar.
Our primitive fathers fashioned canoes, ropes, and huts from the birch, and probably had not travelled far along the road of civilization before discovering how to tap a birch, and make a wine from the flow of the sap. There is a note on this point in an antique number of ** The Gentleman's Magazine " : ** When I was a boy at Tonbridge School, wine used to be made regularly every year from the birch-woods belonging to Summer Hill, in Kent : it was sweet and pleasant to the taste." An historical note relates that during the siege of Hamburg by the Russians, in 1814, almost all the birch- trees of the neighbourhood were destroyed by Bashkirs and other barbarian soldiers, by reason of being tapped for their juice.
90 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
The birch is '* The Birk ' of the old Scottish ballads, like Burns's :
Now simmer blinks on flowery braes. And o'er the crystal streamlet plays. Come let us spend the lightsome days
In the birks of Aberfeldy.
Bonnie lassie, will ye go. To the birks of Aberfeldy ?
In ** The Braes of Yarrow/* by Hamilton of Bangour, it is the fragrance of the birk that is dwelt upon in the story of the maid whose two lovers fought, one being slam ; the other pleads that she will leave Tweedside for Yarrow :
Sweet smells the birk, green grows, green grows the grass —
Yellow on Yarrow's braes the gowan ; Fair hangs the apple frae the rock.
Sweet the wave of Yarrow flowin*.
But the apples of Yarrow will not tempt her, nor the birks :
Flows Yarrow sweet ? as sweet, as sweet flows Tweed ;
As green its grass, its gowan as yellow ; As sweet smells on its braes the birk.
The apple frae its rock as mellow.
(Sir Herbert Maxwell, who quotes the tender ballad in his ** Woodland Notebook,** remarks that no apples hang from the rocks of Tweedside or Yarrow.)
The dainty Lady of the Woods may be essentially feminine, but she has stern associations. The poet Shenstone, in his *' Schoolmistress,** describes how the mere sight of a birch-tree growing near the school- ma am *s house would " Work the simple vassals mickle woe ** :
For not a wind might curl the leaves that blew,
But their limbs shudder'd, and their pulse beat low ;
And, as they look'd, they found their horror grew. And shap'd it into rods, and tingled at the view.
But for all the wrongs the birch may have done us in our youth, she seems to offer balm by her sweet juices ; as the poet Phillips sang :
Even afflictive birch, Curs'd by unletter'd idle youth, distils A limpid current frotm her wotinded bark. Profuse of nursing sap.
WOODLAND TREES 91
Cowley sang of the birch in her tyrannical moods, how, for all her flowing hair, her garments soft and white, ** Yet in cruelty she takes delight," and how :
Most of all her malice she employs In schools, to terrific and awe young boys ; If she chastise, 'tis for the patient's good ; Though oft she blushes with her tender blood.
An old recipe for birch-wine is to make an incision in the bark m March, keeping the wound open by a small stone, and making a bottle fast to catch the flowing juice. This is to be boiled for an hour, with a quart of honey to every gallon of juice, a few cloves, lemon-peel, cinnamon and mace ; then fermented with yeast and bottled.
The birch-bark canoes of the French Canadians are fashioned from a species called the paper birch. The bark is cut off in strips some ten feet long and a yard wide, which are stitched together, and coated with resin, and makes boats so light that one for four passengers weighs but forty pounds or so.
The Highlander falls back on the birch on all occasions of need ; for beds, chairs, tables, spoons, as well as for ropes, which he reckons more enduring than those of hemp. The stronger branches make rafters for his cabin, and his spade, plough, and cart. The brushwood makes his fences, his thatching and his brooms.
Moss often clings to the bark, and covers the ground below the birch, making a bed for the little winged nuts as they drift from the cones, and serving, maybe, as was suggested by a poet, as a lining for a bird s nest :
Sweet bird of the meadow, soft be thy rest, Thy mother will wake thee at mom from thy nest ; She has made a soft nest, little redbreast for thee. Of the leaves of the birch and the moss of the tree.
ROWAN
Rowan, or Mountain Ash {Pyrus Aucuparia).
The rowan belongs to the same family as the rose, and is closely allied with white beam and service-tree, distinguished by their small white flowers in dense groups, and their brilliantly coloured fruits which bear a superficial resemblance to berries.
It is one of the most elegant of British trees, at home in mountainous woods, and frequently met with in cultivation. In Spring, it is attractive by its delicate foliage and large corymbs of blossom, and in Autumn by its clusters of scarlet fruit, which are really very like tiny apples in construction, and eagerly attacked by the thrush tribe.
Its height is from 10 to 30 feet, and it grows rapidly, reaching perhaps 20 feet in ten years, having a straight clean bole covered in greyish bark, curiously marked in age by horizontal scars.
The branches are alternately arranged, and, like leaf, blossom and fruit, give the tree an air of lightness.
The leaves are compoundly pinnate, some seven inches in length, with six to eight pairs of leaflets, and a terminal one ; the margins are sharply toothed, and young leaves are downy below.
The small creamy flowers appear in May and June in a corymb some six inches across ; there are five sepals, five free petals, a number of stamens, and two or more styles. Insects visit the flowers freely and are responsible for pollination.
The fruit turns scarlet in August ; it is yellow within.
92
THE MOUNTAIN ASH
The various names of the tree are of peculiar interest. One name is fowler's service-tree, which partially explains the specific Latin name Aucuparia, from aucepSj a fowler. In Germany, and elsewhere, the bird- catchers would lure such birds as fieldfares, redwings and other thrushes to horse-hair nooses, by the bait of rowan-berries. The name, service, is not connected with this use for the fruit, nor with the word's ordinary sense, but is probably a corruption of the Latin, Sorbus^ name of the sorb or service tree, though it has been traced to the Latin cerevisiGy beer — the berries having found an old-time service in brewing. Evelyn, in his ** Sylva,*' speaks of the fruit as affording ** an incom- parable drink, familiar in Wales." The Russians would distil a spirit from the berries, and in Northern Europe, in times of dearth, they have been dried and ground into flour. The word, rowan, is one of our most interesting tree-names if truly connected with the Gothic word ** run,** a whisper, a mystery, or a magic letter, from ** runer,** to know ; the rowan being of high repute as a protection against witchcraft. (In the Old Norse the word was '* runa,*' a charm, and in earlier times it was the Sanskrit term for a magician, and the rowan would yield staves on which magic runes were inscribed.) There is a legend that the rowan formed the Cross of Calvary, and this led to its being planted round churchyards, in Wales especially. Evelyn on this point remarks that in Wales ** this tree is reputed so sacred that there is not a churchyard without one of them planted in it (as among us the yew) ; so, on a certain day in the year, everybody religiously wears a cross made of the wood ; and the tree is by some authors called fraxinus Cambro-Britannica [the Welsh ash], reputed to be a preservative against fascinations and evil
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94 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
spirits ; whence, perhaps, we call it witchen, the boughs being stuck about the house or the wood used for walking-staves.** The name, mountain, is well deserved by the tree, which flourishes at great heights in the Scottish Highlands, and the name, ash, is a compli- ment to the smooth, ashen-hued rind, the graceful branches and leaves. Another name, quick-beam, may be an allusion to the constant play of the leaves, which toss and turn in the breeze, showing their pale under- sides ; the word ** quick ** is traced to the Anglo-Saxon cwiCf alive.
The power of the tree against witches is told in the proverb :
Rowan tree and red thread Put the witches to their speed.
The old poem of ** The Laidley Worm of Spindles ton Heughs ** has the lines.
Their spells were vain, the boys retum'd
To the queen in sorrowful mood. Crying that witches have no power
Where there is roan -tree wood.
A suggestion that the tree was in high esteem v/ith the Druids was made by Lightfoot in his ** Flora Scotica,** because it is commonly found about their circles of stones. ** In Strathspey,** he wrote, ** they make, on the First of May, a hoop with the wood of this tree, and in the evening and morning cause the sheep and lambs to pass through it.**
In those days, branches of rowan would be hung over the doors of houses, stables, and cowhouses to ward off ** fascinations.** The dairymaid would bring down her herd from the mountain pastures with a rod of rowan in her hand. In the dairy, if, after churning, the butter proved obstinate in the making, a churn-staff of rowan would work wonders. The farmer *s wife would hang a rowan spray above her pillow for the sake of safe sleep. And to this day rowan may be found in the Scottish byre, while before the cottage door young rowans may be seen, plaited into an arch, insuring protection from witches to the incomers.
WOODLAND TREES 95
A merry tale is told by the author of a work called ** Wanderings.'* In his home village he had two small tenants, one commonly known as Jem, the other as Sally, whose house was near Jem's ; and Sally was a witch. Meeting Jem one day his landlord enquired about his cow, which had fallen sick : ** She's coming on surprisingly, sir," quoth he. *' The last time the cow- doctor came to see her, * Jem,' said he, looking earnestly at Old Sally's house, * Jem,' said he, * mind and keep your cow-house door shut before the sun goes down, otherwise I won't answer for what may happen.' * Ay ay, my lad, said I, * I understand your meaning ; but I am up to the old slut.' " He was aware that old Sally would cast her evil eye on the cow, and so he had stuck a bit of ** wiggin," or rowan, over the cow-house.
Gilpin, with his eye for '* forest scenery," notes how, on some rocky mountain of the Highlands, covered with dark pines and waving birch, which cast a solemn gloom over a lake below, a few rowans among them have a fine effect. In Summer, the light green tint of their foliage, and in Autumn the glowing berries, contrast with the deeper green of the pines, adding what he calls ** some of the most picturesque furniture " of the rugged mountains.
But a poet's pen is called for, to describe
How clung the rowan to the rock.
And through the foliage showed his head,
With narrow leaves and berries red,
lines which suggest how it makes content with bleak and rocky crags, where few other trees would deign to live.
The early ripening of the fruit, in August or September, when most tress are still in Summer's garb, caught the attention of Wordsworth :
The mountain ash No eye can overlook, when, *mid a grove Of yet unfaded trees, she lifts her head Deck'd with Autumnal berries that outshine Spring's richest blossoms.
The fruit is a welcome provender to migratory birds in September. A North-Country sportsman, driving woods
% THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
for blackgame, may find areas swarming with song and mis tie- thrushes, blackbirds, and ring-ouzels, which have been attracted by the scarlet clusters of fruits, and have stayed their pilgrimage to enjoy the fine feasting. In Northern Russia, where the tree is abundant, the Bohemian waxwing is a great patron of the Sign of the Rowan. The tree owes much to the birds, which carry off the seeds, to drop them at a distance.
The fruit, somewhat harsh to human taste, makes a pleasant preserve ; the Welsh make of it a kind of perry, and some Scottish Highlanders may still convert it into a sort of cider, or extract a fiery spirit.
Virgil noted that the rowan's berries would be sure to attract thrush and blackbird to any grove where it grew ; and Evelyn, speaking of the berries as lure for thrushes, said, ** As long as they last in your woods you will be sure of their company."
Various minor uses are found for the hard, fine-grained wood which takes a high polish, as for handles to hammers, knives and forks, and musical instruments. As an undergrowth it is valued by the forester, yielding a quick return, and affording tough poles, or material for hoops or crates ; and it has a value as a '* nurse " to the oak and other trees.
It is a tree of wonderfully adaptable nature, and the seeds, as distributed by the birds, thrive in the unlikeliest places. A forester has named the rowan the Israelite among our forest trees, thriving on any sort of soil, from the sea-level to the limits of sylvan vegetation, asserting itself where it finds the slightest foothold on crags, rocks, ruins, or even where moss and fallen leaves have collected in the forks of trees.
In Autumn, the leaves turn from green to yellow, and to a bright red if the weather be propitious : then, as a poet sings :
The scarlet rowan seems to mock
The red sea-coral — berries, leaves, and al! Light swinging from the moist, green, shining rock
Which beds the foaming torrent's turbid fall.
u
HEDGEROW TREES
I"
ELMS
Elms (Ulmm campestris), (U. montana).
The genus Ulmus has many species, which have in common oblique leaves, the blade going further down the leaf stalk on one side than on the other ; similar leaves occur in the lime, but on that tree they are heart-shaped at the base, whereas in the elms they are rounded. The leaf margins are toothed like a saw, and each tooth usually bears a subsidiary tooth.
The flowers appear before the leaves ; they contain stamens and a pistil, and occur in dense purplish tufts at the ends of the twigs, often giving an attractive aura to the trees in March.
The fruit is winged, by development of the fruit wall.
A dark, rugged bark, mighty limbs passing into twiglets and small leaves, are among the distinctive points of the elm.
A well-grown elm will rise to about 100 feet in height, developing a noble girth. It will send out massive, horizontal limbs to 40 feet from the trunk. The branches and twigs of the dome are multitudinous, but the cover afforded is relatively thin. It matures in seventy to eighty years ; thereafter, it has a tendency to become hollow in the centre, though it may live on for hundreds of years.
Though the timber is strong, and specially resistant to rot when exposed to alternate wetting and drying, and so is useful for mill-gates, the limbs have a habit of falling without warning, crashing to the ground even in calm weather, so that it is not altogether wise to sit under a large elm.
The common, or small-leaved elm {U. campestris) is a native of North America and Siberia, and has been established in Britain since the days of the Roman occupation, but it is by no means certain that it was introduced by the Romans. Abundant as are the flowers and seeds, it rarely grows from self-sown seeds, which fail to ripen in this climate, but it multiplies freely from suckers, thrown up even at forty yards distance.
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100 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
The wych elm (U. montana) is believed to be a native of Scotland and the North Country. As a rule it throws up no suckers, but its seeds ripen, and produce flourishing crops. Its branches are more spreading, the leaves larger, than those of the common elm, and it flowers earlier. A drooping tendency of the branches gives the tree its distinctive look.
THE HEDGEROW ELMS
The tall, abounding elm, that grows,
In hedgerows up and down ; In field and forest, copse and park,
And in the peopled town ; With colonies of noisy rooks.
That nestle on its crown. HoOD.
We have an *' elm of the plain," in the common or small-leaved elm, and an *' elm of the mountain ** in the wych elm, sometimes called Scots elm, mountain elm and witch-hazel, but the trees' habits in this country do not accord with these botanical names, and each is more at home in a valley than on a mountain. The story goes that the common elm was imported by the Romans, but of this there is no proof, and its age-old history is misty as to its origin in Britain : the elm of Italy is a distinct species. It has the proud distinction of being one of the finest and tallest of European trees ; it grows rapidly, with an upright and a tall bole, remarkably uniform in size from root to crown. English travellers in the New World rejoice to see the fine elms of their homeland about Boston. At Washington, they see the American elm, which seems not to thrive in the British climate.
While the elm is perhaps the most stately of all our woodland trees, yet it is a familiar and a homely tree, thriving in hedgerows. Like the rooks which delight in nesting in its branches, it seems to be especially at home in the old English park, and is associated much with cathedrals, castles, and palaces ; its dense foliage making it most suitable for forming an avenue. The common elm has lived with us for more than a thousand years, and has won a sure place in our hearts ; and, save the oak, it has contributed more than any tree to the charm of rural England. Scarcely a picture is painted of a rustic scene without an old elm appearing,
101
ELM
HEDGEROW TREES 103
shading the village green, or making a framework to the homestead ; it fills the painters eye with delight, and its rich foliage gives fine effects of light and shade.
Gilpin, in his ** Forest Scenery,** places the elm next to the oak in picturesque effect, and as being inferior to the oak only in its skeleton or denuded state, having, he thought, less character m the ramifications of its boughs and sprays : ** This defect,** he remarked, ** appears chiefly in the skeleton of the elm. In full foliage its character is better marked. No tree is better adapted to receive grand masses of light. In this respect it is superior to the oak and the ash.'* Massive as the foliage is, yielding dense shade, it never appears heavy to the eye, like that of the horse-chestnuts, owing to the lightness of the spray, the smallness of the leaves, and the free way they dance to a breeze.
Especially decorative is the wych elm ; with its drooping branches, so dense in foliage, there is a fanciful suggestion about it of a lady in an old-fashioned dress, with voluminous green, hooped and puckered petticoats. From the hop-like look of the clusters of flowers the elm has earned the rustic name, hop-elm. The origin of its proper name is forgotten. But it is remembered how dairy-maids of old would set sprigs of the wych elm in holes of their churns to make the butter come freely, a charm against witchcraft. But Loudon remarks, it is well known that our Saxon ancestors called all the places where there were salt springs, wych, like Droitwitch, or Nantwich, and suggests this to be the origin of wych elm.
Early in the year we see, as token of Spring on the way, a rich vinous tint spreading over the elms, as they break into flower. The blossoms grow in purple-tinted clusters, stamens mingled with pistils ; the pollen flies on the winds* wings, the one-seeded ovaries develop, and turn to green wings, which take flight with the seeds. Then, when the harvester, the wind, has reaped, the leaf-buds open, a single branch perhaps setting the fashion to the others of putting on Spring's livery. The first soft
104 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
burst of verdancy is all the more delightful for the contrast of the dark lines of the boughs, to be traced through the young leaves from finest twigs slowly merging mto the mighty beams. The day comes when we quote Brownmg :
The lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf.
The 1 8th of April has been given the name, UlmifrondeSy from the elms usually appearing on that day in full leaf. Every old veteran then puts on so bright a garb as to make us think it were endowed with perpetual youth. The light and tender hue soon turns to a darker green. Far through the Summer the elm keeps its somewhat sombre tone, not contributing much to Autumn's tints until a sunny spell comes in October, when the leaves of one bough perhaps may set an example to others by turning to '' patines of bright gold.'' They turn brown as the others follow the fashion, touched by yellow- sandalled Autumn.
There comes an autumnal period when the elms reach that stage of disrobement which was like their state in April when they were robing ; again the mighty bole and the massive limbs stand out darkly against the light of a bright sky, and the innumerable triangles formed by the finer boughs are visible through the thinning leaves. Backed by a Hunters Moon, the feathery softness of the foliage contrasts with lines as hard as in a deeply-bitten engraving. The same effect, but coloured, is when a group of elms is silhouetted against a misty range of hills, the morning sun behind ; while every bough is in heavy black, the gold leaves are shining as with some inner light. Dark masses of shadow are the newly uncovered rooks' nests, by which the tree is recog- nized from afar.
The leaf of the elm makes a curious pattern, divided as it is by the mid-vein into two unequal parts, the bases of the two sides springing from different points. Some- what pear-shaped, pointed at the apex, serrated as to
HEDGEROW TREES 105
margin, somewhat rough and crumpled, the aspect of the leaf is a defensive one ; and it is to be remarked that the elm is a member of the same natural order that harbours the stinging nettle. And, to a slight extent, the leaf is armed ; for the hairs of the midrib have a mild power to sting, possibly a half-hearted protection against browsers. Few would associate the majestic tree with the humble stinging-nettle, and the nettles, for the most part, are plants of small beauty. Evelyn assures us that in his day the leaves would be gathered as fodder for swine and cattle : ** They will eat them before oats,*' he said, *' and thrive exceedingly well upon them." Certainly deer and cattle delight in browsing on the foliage.
The name, Ulmus, has been thought by some authorities to be connected with an instrument of punishment, such as a rod for the beating of slaves. A word nearly identical is found in various Germanic dialects. There is the Anglo-Saxon ^Im ; and there are such versions as lime, 01m, and Ulme, so that it has been remarked that the word plays through all the vowels.
The tree has given its name to many places, like the oak, but to a lesser degree — Barn Elms, Elmley, Elmstree, and Nine Elms, and country houses beyond number are named from the tree — Elm Dale, Elm Grove. The Old Gaelic name was learn, reflected in the name of the lake now called Loch Lomond, Lake of Elms. Above forty places in England were mentioned in Domesday Book, taking their name from the tree.
Ulum '' is still one of the German names, and the city of Ulm was probably named from the trees.
Many and varied are the uses of the timber. It lacks the strength of the oak, and the elasticity of the ash ; but is tough, not given to splitting, brown, hard, heavy, and of fine grain. It is the favoured wood of the coffin-maker. And as it decays quickly when neither dry nor under water, no doubt it soon gives back our mortal dust to the earth. Wheelwrights favour it for the naves of wheels, and have given campestris the
106 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
name, nave-elm. In water it is marvellously enduring : m Old London it was used for the water-pipes. Ship- builders hold it m esteem, for the keels of ships, for blocks and other furniture of rigging. It is the favourite wood of the pump-maker, and the maker of water-gates and water-wheels. In the days of the three-deckers the oak was reserved mainly for the navy, and the elm was put to many uses now passed to other woods : ** Elm is a timber of most singular use,*' said Evelyn, and gave a long catalogue of its services : how it was proper for mills as for ladles, handles for tools, rails and gates, axle- trees, blocks for the hat-maker, chopping blocks for the butcher or for the carver and — sadly-perished use — especially for the making of shovel-board tables of great length, such as were found in those days in the halls of all the nobility. He tells of logs of elm which had been found buried in bogs, and had turned so hard that by the grain alone could they be distinguished from the most polished and hardest ebony.
One old and particular use of elm-wood remains to this day, the fashioning of wooden bowls, but few of the bowl-makmg craftsmen are left who make the bowls in the old way, and, as one of them says, after the old stroke. At Bucklebury, in Berkshire, lives, at the time of writing, an old bowl-maker who has devoted his life to the craft, as did his father and grandfather before him, and their fathers through generations ; once every month his grandfather would journey to London on foot, carrying his elm-bowls on his back. The bowls are cut on a primitive lathe, worked by a treadle, and when one bowl has been cut from a block of elm, another is cut from the piece carved out. Wonderfully smooth and shapely they are ; but skill in their carving comes from life-long apprenticeship and practice, and country boys are too scholarly nowadays to take to the old trade.
Considering all the various services of the wood, a line of La Fontaine may come to mind, where he makes a carver in wood exclaim,
HEDGEROW TREES 107
Sera-t-il dleu, table, ou cuvette ?
What shall I make of it ? ay, that's the rub ; A god, a table, or a salt-fish tub ?
Two misfortunes commonly overtake the elm, and they have given it a reputation for treachery. It has a habit of sending out its roots horizontally, and close to the surface, their tips being watered by the dripping of rain from the long branches ; rain that may in time wash away the soil, so that the tree loses its grip on the earth, and suddenly falls. And then the large limbs will mysteriously and suddenly crash to earth. Several explanations have been attempted, among them those of the squirrel in Richard Jefferies' fable, '* Wood Magic " :
Elms are very treacherous, and I recommend you to have nothing to do with them, dear.**
*' But how could he hurt me ? ** said Bevis.
" He can wait till you go under him,** said the squirrel,
and then drop that big bough on you. He has had that bough waiting to drop on somebody for quite ten years. Just look up and see how thick it is, and heavy ; why, it would smash a man out flat. Now, the reason the Elms are so dangerous is because they will wait so long till somebody passes. Trees can do a great deal, I can tell you : why, I have known a tree, when it could not drop a bough, fall down altogether when there was not a breath of wind nor any lightning, just to kill a cow or a sheep out of sheer bad temper.*'
Frost may be a more probable cause of the tragedy than the elm*s bad temper ; or the tunnelling operations of such as the caterpillar of the goat-moth {Cossus ligniperda), or of the bark beetles (ScolytidcB), which drive galleries through the bark. Whole avenues have been laid low by the beetles* borings. A minor enemy attacks the foliage, named elm-flea, a pretty species of Haltica, an eccentric little leaping beetle, in a glittering armour of green and gold, with surprising thighs to its hinder legs, with which it leaps prodigiously. At one moment a branch is covered by the pigmy hoppers ;
108 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
at the next, all have vanished. But the elm has marvellous tenacity of life ; and often one admires the hollow shell of a veteran which still puts forth green leaves. A curious effect of the breaking of a limb, from bad temper or otherwise, is an immense, wart-like swelling, from which leafy twigs emerge The mottled wood of such a distortion takes a fine polish, and is of value for veneering.
As the beech is associated with the tapping of the woodpecker, and its wild laugh, so the elm is linked to the rooks, who have made it their favourite nest-tree ; when they desert an old rookery, countryfolk say, the treacherous elms are no longer safe. A single elm will seat a thousand birds of the sable wing. The rook and the elm seem to go so naturally together that, as a tree- lover remarked, a rook's feather upon the ground below the tree — a feather so clean, smooth, glossy, with such beautiful white and slender quills— seems almost a produce of the tree itself. The rooks prune the elms, by breaking off the living twigs for the wicker-work of their nests, and varied opinions have been put forward as to how far this is to the benefit of the trees, or harmful ; on the whole they seem to bear the pruning complacently. The homeward flight of the rooks to their roosting- trees in Autumn evenings is one of the most familiar of bird- pictures, bringing to mind the lines :
Night thickens, and the crow Makes wing to th' rooky wood,
or :
Retiring from the downs, where all day long They pick their scanty fare, a blackening train Of loitering rooks thick urge their weary flight. And seek the shelter of the grove.
Nearly every Winter day, the rooks pay a visit of inspection to the ancestral trees where they were reared, or have reared their families.
Perhaps the most famous of our elms are those of the grand quadruple avenue known as the Long Walk, in Windsor Park, running for nearly three miles from the Castle gates ; many of the trees are 100 feet high, and
HEDGEROW TREES 109
fifteen feet in girth. They were planted, we are assured by the historians, in 1680, by Charles II, and number more than sixteen hundred, but many of the veterans have succumbed.
A famed elm, familiar as a ruin to travellers from London to Brighton, is the Crawley elm, which measured in old age sixty-one feet in circumference at the ground, and reared itself seventy feet high. There is a local legend of a child having been born in the chamber-like hollow of the trunk, at one time fitted with a door. On occasions, neighbours would meet, to banquet in the cavity.
Warwickshire has boasted of a tree of two hundred years of age, one hundred and fifty feet in height, supposed to be the loftiest tree in England, a notable specimen of ** Warwickshire weed," as elms are there called ; oaks are Sussex weeds, and beeches the weeds of Buckinghamshire. Shakespeare no doubt was thinking of Warwickshire elms when he put the lines into Adriana's mouth :
Come, I will fasten on this sleeve of thine ; Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine j Whose weakness, married to thy stronger state, Makes me with thy strength to communicate.
The Italian gardeners of old, as of to-day, selected the elm as the living props for their vines, thus adding great ornament to the tree, as alluded to by many ancient writers. On a vine being trained to an elm, it was said to be married. It would seem that in those days lovers commonly forgot their occupations while thinking of their loves : thus Corydon chides himself : ** Ah, Corydon ! Corydon, what love-fever hath enslaved thee ? Half-pruned is thy vine that mantles in the leafy elm ! '* Like a wise man, he decides to resume his tasks, * To weave, of osiers and pliant rushes, such implements as his work needs : if this Alexis disdains thee, thou shalt yet find another.'* Milton, describing the occupations of Adam and Eve, sang :
They led the vine To wed her elm : she, spoused, about him twines Her marriageable arms ; and with her brings Her dower, the adopted clusters, to adorn His barren leaves.
no THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
And we find this quaint note in Loudon : ** In the early days of Christianity, the hunters were accustomed to hang the skins of wolves they had killed in the chase on the elms in the churchyards, as a kind of trophy ** — just as our gamekeepers now hang the skins of stoats and weasels on their woodland gallows.
Cowley was mindful of the association of Bacchus, or the vine, with the elm :
Thou, 0 Pteleas, to the swain allows Shades to his cattel, timber for his plows. Enobled thou above the leafie race, In that an amorous God does thee embrace.
Ancient writers refer much to the noble tree ; it was the appropriate tree for a funereal grove, since it produced no fruit for human food. Homer tells how Achilles raised a monument to the father of Andromache in a grove of elms :
Jove's sylvan daughters bade these elms bestow A barren shade and in his honour grow.
Virgil mentions that the Roman husbandmen bent the young elms, while growing, into the proper shape for the buris, or plough-tail.
POPLARS
Poplars (Populus).
Among some thirty species of poplar, five kinds are commonly grown in this country : the aspen and the white, grey, black, and Lombardy poplars.
The poplars are usually dioecious trees — bearing the male and female flowers on different individuals, although rarely one may encounter both on the same tree, and even in the same catkin, and bisexual flowers have been observed. The flowers are produced in catkins, as in the closely-related willows.
(The botanical point may be noted, that a catkin is a special form of racemose inflorescence, consisting of a number of small flowers inserted separately in the axils of bracts (borne on a special axis) : the point being, that the flowers must be separate, and not in groups, as they are, for instance, in the sweet chestnut.)
The female catkins are greenish or yellowish ; when the seed is ripe, they have a cottony appearance, as the seeds bear tufts of whitish hairs which enable them to float on the wind.
The black poplar (P. nigra) is a tree of rapid growth, reaching perhaps 40 feet in ten years, and rising to a height of from 50 to about 80 feet. Not a long-lived tree, it matures in about fifty years. The wood is soft and fibrous, of small value except for packing-cases ; in Holland, it provides sabots.
(Poplar wood is used also for making match-sticks and for cotton- reels.)
The origin of the name black poplar, not a happy one, is variously explained. Neither the bark nor foliage is particularly black. The name may emphasize the contrast with the white poplar, in that the leaves have no white down on their undersides. The bark is grey, somewhat sombre, and it has been suggested that the name was given on this account, and from a dark circle to be observed on the trunk. The trunk is knotty, which distinguishes it from the other poplars, having great swellings or burrs which spoil its symmetry.
Ill
112 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
The leaf Is at once distinguished from those of the white or grey poplar by its smooth surface, pointed apex, and toothed margin. It is roughly triangular in shape, but with a rounded base, giving a suggestion that the leaf is four-sided. In Autumn it turns to gold.
The catkins appear before the leaves ; the male ones are two or three inches in length, and appear dark red on account of the stamens. The females are often rather longer, yellowish green in flower, and cottony later, when seeds are being distributed.
A variety of this tree, of larger growth, is known as the black Italian poplar, a mis-named tree, not Italian.
The aspen, or asp (P. tremula) has ovate leaves, with a wavy, toothed margin, and long stalks flattened sideways, as if they had been pinched ; they hang downwards, and flutter in the slightest current of air ; hence the legend that Calvary's Cross was made of aspen, and the tree trembles for ever in remembrance. It is found almost throughout the British Isles, and flourishes in the Highlands as in the high Bavarian Alps.
The Lombardy poplar (P. fastigiata) is a familiar ornament, with its cypress-like growth, of the landscapes of Southern England, Central and Southern Europe, and of much of Asia. It is probably a cultivated race of the black poplar. The first of its race is believed to have been brought to England in the mid-days of the eighteenth century by the third Duke of Argyll. The branches grow straight upwards, in fastigiate, or spire-shape ; so that the tree suggests a giant feather, towering to perhaps 150 feet. It is famed for its quick growth, reaching some 60 feet in twenty years.
The white poplar, or abele (P. alba) is a large tree, perhaps 100 feet high, with smooth grey bark much furrowed in old age. The branches are of horizontal growth ; the broad leaves are heart-shaped, with waved lobed margins, smooth above, white and cottony below, borne on leaf-stalks flattened at the sides, so that they flutter in the least wind. In Mid-Summer, when the seeds are shed, their white cottony appendages bestrew the ground below the tree. A peculiarity of the foliage is the variety in the form of the leaves, some being so deeply lobed as to become palmate. The snowy whiteness of the undersides of the leaves, and of young branches, give the charming white and green appearance of the tree when stirred by the wind.
The grey poplar (P. canescens) shows a close affinity to the white poplar. Fine specimens grow to 1 00 feet or more. The leaves differ from those of the white poplar in that they are not lobed, nor have they persistent white coating on the lower face ; the tree's name may be due to their comparative greyness.
OUR BRITISH POPLARS
^a?-
Hard by a poplar shook alway. All silver-green with gnarled bark ; For leagues no other tree did mark The level v^raste, the rounding gray.
Tennyson's phrase, ** All silver-green/* well describes the grey poplar, which bears at once whitish and greenish leaves. The twinkling of the leaves has caught many a poet's fancy, as Cowper's, in the line ** The poplar, that with silver lines his leaf," and Barry Cornwall's,
The green woods moved, and the light poplar shook Its silver pyramid of leaves.
The name, poplar, is variously explained ; some trace it to paipalloy to vibrate or shake, an appropriate allusion to the play of the leaves in the wind ; others remark that the tree was used in ancient times to decorate public places in Rome, hence it was called Arbor populi, the tree of the people. From the Spanish name of the tree, alamo, is derived the word alameda, the name given to public walks, lined by poplars. Their pale, green, shining, triangular leaves have long and thin footstalks, and the way they are flattened at the sides contributes to their agitation when there is the least current of air :
When Zephyrs wake,
The aspen's trembling leaves must shake.
They tremble, when there is no breeze ; as Mrs. Hemans observed in her verse enshrining the old legend that the dainty tree is accursed. She tells how the rustic accounts for the restlessness of the wan leaves :
The cross, he deems, the blessed cross whereon The meek Redeemer bowed His head to death,
113
^
114 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
Was formed of aspen wood ; and since that hour Through all its race the pale tree hath sent down A thrilling consciousness, a secret awe. Making them tremulous, when not a breeze Disturbs the airy thistle-down, or shakes The light hues of the shining gossamer.
Old Gerard has a somewhat cryptic remark, but one clearly not intended to be gallant, on the point of the fluttering leaves : that the asp ** may also be called tremble after the French name, considering it is the matter whereof women's toongs were made, which seldom cease wagging."
A signal compliment was paid to the w W
aspen by Meredith, in his description of Jk'"v^V*^~''|^
a dainty rogue in porcelain ** : * Aspens imaged in water, waiting for the breeze, would offer a susceptible lover some suggestion of her face/*
The poplar was sacred to Hercules, whose votaries, making celebration in his honour, twined its leaves round their heads. The story goes that Hercules destroyed Cacus in a cavern near Mount Aventinus, which was covered with poplars ; and in the minute of his triumph bound his brows with a branch of white poplar ; and when he descended into the infernal regions he returned with a wreath of white poplar round his head. The heat of the heros brow made the inner part of the leaf, touching his forehead, white ; while the smoke arising from the infernal regions turned the upper surface of the leaves to the hue they wear to this day. Another thought about the leaves is that the ancients consecrated the poplar to Father Time, because the leaves are in continual motion ; and, being blackish green on one side, white with cotton on the other, they stand emblematic of the alternation of day and night.
Homer compares the fall of Simoisius, by the hand of Ajax, to a poplar newly felled ; as Pope translated the passage :
So falls a poplar, that in wat*ry ground
Rais'd high the head, with stately branches crown'd,
HEDGEROW TREES
115
BARK OF WHITE POPLAR
Fell'd by some artist with his shining steel. To shape the circle of the bending wheel. Cut down it lies, tall, smooth, and largely spread, With all its beauteous honours on its head.
It w£is an ancient custom of lovers to write verses on the bark of different trees ; Ovid fixes on the poplar in (Enone's lament : ** There grows a poplar by the river- side (ah, I well remember it !) on which is carved the motto of our love. Flourish, thou poplar ! — fed by the bordering stream, — whose furrowed bark bears this inscription — * Sooner shall Xanthus return to his source, than Paris be able to live without (Enone/ ''
Tender lines ! — in which we see that the fidelities and the inconstancies — the beech with its emblem of the entwined hearts, the lettered poplar by the river — are the same old and long-past ones over again : ** Human life,*' as a philosopher comments, ** and nature are everywhere like the waterfalls among the Alps, sparkle, and teardrops, and rainbows whenever we look, though the stream be never the same for an instant."
1 16 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
The legend of the poplars in general is that Phaeton borrowed the chariot and horses of the Sun for a day ; lost control of his steeds ; and by his heedless driving was setting half the world on fire when Jupiter hurled him into the River Po, where he was drowned. His sisters, the Heliades, wandering there, and mourning for him, were turned at last into poplars, and wept amber tears. The evidence in favour of the story is the abundance of black poplars on the banks of the Po ; and that the poplar, like other aquatic trees, becomes so surcharged with moisture that, passing this off, it may be said to weep. There is no tree on which the sun shines more brightly than on the black poplar, thus still showing gleams of affection to the sole memorial of the son whom his fondness has contributed to destroy : or, as Spenser sang.
And eke those trees, in whose transformed hue The Sun's sad daughters wailed the rash decay Of Phaethon, whose Hmbs with Hghtnings rent. They gathering up, with sweet tears did lament.
In a treatise, ** The Forester," the author speaks lovingly of the corner of his garden
Where, rustling, turn the many twinkling leaves Of aspens tall.
** There stands a group of fine aspen poplars, about sixty feet high, with their clean gray stems and rugged horizontal branches stationary as the earth upon which they stand, with leaves all in motion like an agitated sky, without a breeze of wind below. Although the evening is so still that the sound of a burn fully a mile off is easily heard, the leaves cannot remain quiet ; and now and again, as the air rises into the most gentle breeze, and almost brings with it the sound of the very minnow's flip upon the surface of the water in the far-off pool, the leaves of the aspen vibrate to the sound, and their rustling falls upon the ear sweeter than any music.*'
HEDGEROW TREES
117
Evelyn quaintly recommended the poplars, on account of their speedy growth, ** to such late builders as seat their houses in naked and unsheltered places, and that would put a guise of antiquity upon any new enclosure ; since by these, while a man is on a voyage of no long continuance, his house and lands may be so covered as to be hardly known at his return.** He tells us that the Dutch look upon a plantation of poplars as an ample portion for a daughter, the trees, after their first seven years of life, being ** annually worth twelve pence more.** And he tells an amusing story of a worthy knight. Sir Richard Wes- ton, who made a poplar plantation near Richmond, and calculated that the thirty pounds laid out thereon would render at least ten thousand pounds in eighteen years; each tree yielding thirty plants, and every one of them thirty more, after each seven years im- proving twelve pence in growth till they arrived at their acme. Deponent saith not that the worthy knights descendants reaped the expected harvest.
Cobbett, in his *' Woodlands,** poured his scorn on the Lombardy poplar, which belonged, he said, to a very worthless family : *' That well-known, great, strong, ugly thing, called the Lombardy poplar, is very apt to furnish its neighbours with a surplus population of caterpillars, and other abominable insects ** : a remark perhaps worth quoting as a curiosity. The poplar was known slightly to William Gilpin, but as a young tree, having been lately introduced : ** Its youth is promising,'* he said, and remarked of the tree in the wind, The Italian poplar waves in one simple sweep from the top to the bottom, like an ostrich feather on a
LOMBARDY POPLAR
118 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
lady's head. All the branches coincide in the motion.** His editor, Lauder, thought the Lombardy poplar fatiguing to the eye when lining the roads of France for long leagues, and that when seen crowning a far line of hills it suggested the soldiers of an army drawn up on parade. Several poets have observed the manner in which the tree waves in one mass : Leigh Hunt sang of
The poplar's shoot, Which, like a feather, waves from head to foot.,
and Barry Cornwall, with the same thought, wrote :
The poplar there Shoots up its spire, and shakes its leaves i* the sun Fantastical.
Spenser wrote :
His hand did quake And tremble like a leaf of aspen green.
Thompsons contribution runs :
A perfect calm ; that not a breath Is heard to quiver through the closing woods. Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leaves Of aspen tall.
Sir Walter Scott gave us the happy lines :
Oh, woman ! in our hours of ease Uncertain, coy, and hard to please, And variable as the shade By the light quivering aspen made. When pain or sickness rends the brow, A ministering angel thou.
And old Homer compared the motion of the leaves to the twinkling of the fingers of the maids of Alcinous when plying their shuttles :
Some ply the loom ; their busy fingers move Like poplar leaves when Zephyr fans the grove.
The Spanish poet, Garcilasso, compared the tree to his lady*s hair :
Each wind that breathes, gallantly here and there Waves the fine gold of her disorder'd hair. As a green poplar leaf in wanton play Dances for joy at rosy break of day.
HEDGEROW TREES 119
The wood of the poplars, weak perhaps from the speed of growth, IS of small value, but it has one or two virtues, as that it does not split readily, and so is used for packing- cases made with nails. But the white poplar's timber is esteemed by coach-builders. One peculiar quality of the wood in general is that its lightness and smoothness give it a value for the making of floors, and it has the additional virtue that it is slow to take fire ; scarcely any of our woods is more difficult to burn. Kept dry, it is enduring ; hence the wit of an old distich, inscribed on a poplar plank :
Though heart of oak be e'er so stout. Keep me dry, and I'll see him out.
The ancients favoured the wood for their shields and bucklers, from its lightness, and because, when struck, the blow indented, but neither pierced nor cracked, unless a blow from a Hercules.
It is an old story that after Mid-Summer Day the poplar turns its leaves to an opposite quarter of the heavens ; and the tree is reckoned by country people to be something of a weather-prophet, indicating storms by upturning the whites of its leaves : hence the remark of some wise infant, ** The weather" tree says it will rain.*'
SYCAMORE AND MAPLE
Sycamore (Acer pseudo-plafanus).
The sycamore — great maple or false plane — though not a true native, is an ancient inhabitant, introduced to our country probably four or five hundred years ago ; and no doubt it will continue to sow its seeds in our soil as long as that endures. It is a tree of Central Europe and of wooded mountains ; noble in proportions ; hard, and strong to resist winds. It grows fast, reaching a height of 60 feet, the timber maturing at about a hundred years. It flourishes especially in North Britain.
The bark is smooth in youth, but becomes rough, and flakes off as the tree ages.
The leaves are in opposite pairs. The long leaf -stalk is often red. The blade is usually five-lobed, six or eight inches across, the lobes pointed and indented : the upper face is glossy dark green, the lower dull or greyish, so that the tree shows different tones in a pleasing way ; hues of red often variegate the greenery. The leaves stiffen as they grow, and turn yellow in Autumn.
In early Summer appear the long hanging tassels of small, yellowish- green flowers, pollinated by the aid of insects, which come for nectar. Although some trees may bear male flowers exclusively, it is more usual to find male, female, and bisexual flowers mixed in the same tassel of flowers. The female flowers may possess stamens, and so appear to be bisexual, but in such case the stamens do not function. There follow the scimitar-shaped, brownish keys, or samaras, which the tree produces abundantly when over twenty years of age, forming dainty para- chutes to fall spinning in the wind to carry the seed from its parent.
The Norway maple (A. platanoides) bears a general resemblance to the sycamore, but the bark shows no tendency to scale, the leaves are much more pointed, the flowers are larger, and the inflorescences more spreading, whilst the fruits have a broader wing. The flowers appear on the naked twigs. Exotic maples sometimes cultivated in gardens are A. saccharinttm and A. rubrum, of Canada and the United States ; the latter the well-known red maple, having red flowers and flaming leaves in Autumn.
120
THE SYCAMORE
The sycamore, capricious in attire,
Now green, now tawny, and ere Autumn yet
Has changed the woods, in scarlet honours bright,
COWPER.
This IS among our noblest trees, a rival in massiveness to oak and ash, and of beautiful form. The stem is smooth, its colour, a fine ash-grey, agreeable to the eye, and throws out branches low to the ground, which may become huge limbs. Higher branches are shorter, so that when growmg alone the tree shows a rounded crown. In Summer, the vast mass of foliage, unbroken save for caves of shadow, gives what an old-time forester describes as ** an impenetrable shade." The Spring tints are tender, glowing, harmonious ; the rich greenery of Summer accords with the massive form ; and the browns and reds of Autumn give the tree a nobility in decay. The bark and leaf-stalks of young shoots are of clear red tone, which contrasts with the delicate greenery of the young foliage. On some trees, which may have been pollarded, young leaves are tinted a warm crimson ; the sycamore certainly is *' capricious in attire." In Summer, the leaves become covered with ** honey-dew,** exuded by the aphides which feed on the tree. Like all the maples, the sycamore has a rich sugary sap, which has been made into a wine, like that drawn from the birch. In Autumn, the leaves are commonly blotched as with large splashes of ink, the work of a fungus {Rhytisma), Every leaf of a tree and every tree in a wood may be affected, apparently without harming the tree. Little red growths on the leaves are due to a mite (Phytoptus),
In the language of flowers, the sycamore signifies *' curiosity,** this idea arising from the Biblical story of Zacchaeus climbing the tree ; but it was the true Sycomore he climbed, the fig mulberry (Ficus sycomorus), with
121
122 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
which our tree is sadly confused. Its rightful name is great maple, as the flowers, fruit and leaves prove. Another confusion is hinted at m the specific name, Pseudo' Plat anus, the tree bemg known in Scotland as the plane, from its plane-like leaves, and from a habit of peeling its bark.
The wood is white, firm, close-grained, and is easily worked, polishing finely, and appeals to turners for all manner of small articles, such as moulds for butter, wooden dishes and spoons of the old-fashioned sort, and for the farmer's cheese and cider presses. The name, Acer, signifies ** vigorous,** or ** sharp,** and is supposed to have been given to this genus because the wood was favoured of old for the heads of pikes and lances ; some are pleased to say the name is from acre ingenium, a sharp wit, the tree having been much used by cunning artificers. ** Sycamore * is traced to ** syke,** a fig, and ** moros,** a mulberry, from a fancy that it resembled the mulberry- tree in foliage and the fig in fruit.
The tree is a special favourite in the North of England, being hardy and enduring. It withstands the most powerful winds, and though it may be exposed by the sea to a prevailing wind, will keep erect. Therefore, in the North of England and in Scotland, it has found much favour as a tree for sheltering the bleak farm-house or cottage ; and was planted, for its grateful shade, on the sunny side of dairies.
The tree seems to have been known to Chaucer, who spoke of it as rare, in the fourteenth century. Gerard, in 1597 says, ** The great maple is a stranger in England, only it groweth in the walkes and places of pleasure of noblemen, where it especially is planted for the shadowe- sake.*' Parkinson, writing in 1640, uses the same charming phrase : " It is nowhere found, wild or natural, in our land, that I can learn ; but only planted in orchards or walkes for the shadowes sake.** Evelyn refers to the brewing of a beer from the sap. An allied species, the sugar maple of North America, yields maple-sugar.
SYCAMORE
124 THE NEW BOOK OF TREES
Scottish children, relates an old-times botanist, amuse I themselves by making incisions in the bark, and sucking 1 the sweet sap that flows from the wound very freely ; ■
liquor from which, by fermentation, their elders brewed wine.
An old name in the West of Scotland is ** Dool,** or Grief-tree ; whereby hangs the tale that in olden days the barons would choose a sycamore as the gibbet for their enemies.
MAPLE
Common Maple {Acer campestres).
The small-leaved, common, or field maple is a respected native of England and Ireland, unlike the great maple, or sycamore, which has been with us but a few hundred years. It is best known as a hedgerow shrub, or small tree.
The small leaves, which grow in pairs on slender, crimson leaf-stalks, are divided into three to five lobes, more or less toothed, the clefts between them rounded, the base heart-shaped. They vary much in size, from two to four inches in breadth. When young, they are downy, and may attract the roadside dust ; turning in Autumn to bright yellow, red, and copper tones.
The clusters of greenish-yellow inflorescences appear in May at the end of young shoots, standing erect among the young leaves of Spring, and have small attraction for insects, the wind often scattering the pollen.
They yield the familiar " keys,'* or samaras.
A few maples have come into fame for their size, like one at Farnham Castle, Surrey, noted by Loudon in 1835 as rearing itself to 30 feet in height at the age of fifty years.
The tree commonly suffers from various ills, including the attacks of the same black fungus as assails the sycamore, and a peculiar blight which gives it a hoary look, while the leaves are commonly found studded with small red swellings on their upper sides ; the work of a mite (Phytoptus) which punctured the tissues.
An American maple is called the ash-leaved {A. negundo) having pinna tely compound leaves, with three or five leaflets, and typical maple fruits, a tall, graceful tree with drooping sprays.
A decorative variety, if it may be so called, is common in gardens, with leaves flecked with white.
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THE COMMON MAPLE
As the glory of ** The Fall '* in Canada is due to the flaming leaves of the scarlet maple, so the rich tints of our October hedgerows are due chiefly to our native hedge maple. In Summer, this bush or little tree is so modest that it attracts small attention ; the downy young leaves are often covered by wayside dust. But in Autumn they are dyed in all the hues of the year s sunset, from palest lemon to blood-red orange, and the hedgerow fires they light are visible from afar.
The flowers are not much noticed when, in May, they appear among the young leaves. At an early stage the hairy ovary shows signs of the wings that will grow to bear away the seed ; the two smooth wings that spread horizontally, and twist like a screw-propeller when they make their fateful voyage.
The young branches have a smooth bark, which soon becomes furrowed and corky, setting off the crimson leaf-stalks and the daintily-cut foliage, whose pattern appealed to the mediaeval carvers. Time was when the maples were much favoured by gardeners for topiary work, as they bear the shears as patiently as hornbeam or beech.
The wood below the furrowed bark is fine-grained, veined, of a beautiful pale brown, and takes a high polish. The timber of this little tree is reckoned to be superior to that of the great maple, much of it being curiously marked, and passing under the name of bird's-eye maple. An old name, maser-tree, came from the prized maser-bowls the wood yielded in the middle- ages. The Romans made tables of the wood ; Virgil describes Evander as sitting upon a maple-wood throne :
A maple throne raised higher than the ground Received the Trojan chief.
126
HEDGEROW TREES
127
FIELD MAPLE
Turners have oftened fashioned the wood of the root, knotted and curiously marked, into fancy articles, pipes, snuffboxes, and the like. It is the North-American maples which provided the mottled furniture our fathers admired, and also maple sugar.
That the maple as a tree is very old in our land is suggested by Chaucer's reference to it, in the ** Romaunt of the Rose *' : —
There were elmes great and strong, Maples, ash. . . .
The author of ** Forest Scenery,'* William Gilpin, Vicar of Boldre, in the