CHAPTER XX
THE TREES OF GREAT BRITAIN
As this work has been the most interesting to myself, and, I venture to think, the most complete and useful of all the work I ever did, some account of it may have interest to those who have a taste for Arboriculture and Forestry, a branch of Science which was until recently hardly recog¬ nised in England. When I first took it up there was not a single Fellow of the Royal Society who represented Forestry, and though many English landowners devoted much time and money to improving and beautifying their estates by planting, there was no work in existence more recent than Loudon’s, published in 1838, which gave a complete account of the trees which in our islands are so rich and varied.
I had planted a considerable area of larch on land which had gone out of cultivation during the great agricultural depression which commenced in 1879, but these plantations had suffered so severely from the diseases which became general after the disastrous seasons of 1879 to 1881 that I had almost determined to invest no more capital in what seemed such a disastrous enterprise. But the drier and warmer summers which occurred between 1887 and 1900 convinced me that with better knowledge of trees something might still be done.
In October, 1900, I was staying with, the late Hon. Charles Ellis at Frensham Hall near Haslemere, a district in which trees generally, and conifers especially, thrive better than in most parts of England, and then began to collect the seeds which ripened better than usual in that year on many exotic trees which rarely produce fertile seed in England. My idea then was to find out by experiment whether the seeds ripened in England would produce trees more or less vigorous and healthy than those imported from abroad, which then, and until 1915, wore almost the only source on which our nurserymen depended for their supply of tree seeds,
At several places which I visited in that autumn, among which Tortworth was by far the most prolific, and from numerous friends living in all parts of the country, I got together home-grown seed of nearly a hundred and fifty species and varieties of trees; and when I saw that this experiment was likely to lead to a considerable increase in our knowledge which might be useful to many landowners, who were as generally ignorant of the natural history of trees as I was myself, I conceived the idea of commencing a work on the subject. I was fortunate in having the support and assist¬ ance of several friends who had always been interested in trees and who had planted exotic trees for a long period, among whom the Earl of Ducie, the late Sir Charles Strickland and Sir Hugh Beevor were prominent; and I had sufficient knowledge of horticulture and agriculture to give me a fair start in an undertaking which grew in interest and importance as my knowledge of its difficulties increased.
It seemed to me that though Loudon’s book was, at the time it was published, incomparable in its minute detail, yet it was too much a com¬
pilation, too much based on published and written reports, often inac-
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