began"; and goes on to say, "What is important is the fact that the durmast will thrive and ripen its season's growth in moist northern and western latitudes, which are unfavourable to the development of the pedunculate kind. In our salt-laden atmosphere upon the western seaboard much of the growth made by the pedunculate oak during one season fails to ripen before it is nipped by frost, and the tree is much more subject than the durmast to galls—a sure sign of debility; and it never carries with it the wealth of glossy foliage that never fails to distinguish the latter."
He then speaks of the fine oaks at Merevale Park, which are described on p. 318, as being of the sessile variety, and says that at Knole Park, Kent, on the other hand, the general growth is pedunculate; but there is a magnificent avenue of durmast oaks, leading to the house from the direction of the Wilderness, and these tower far and straight above the gnarled and twisted veterans in the rest of the park.
Another peculiarity of the sessile oak is referred to in a letter from the Hon. Gerald Lascelles to Mr. Stafford Howard, in which he says: 'I doubt whether there is much difference between the timber of the sessile and pedunculate oaks, but I think that the sessile is straighter and cleaner in growth, and one thing is certain— that it is almost immune from the attacks of the caterpillar (Tortrix viridana) which so often destroys every leaf on the pedunculate oak in early summer. Whether this does any real harm or not is a moot point, but I think it must be a check to growth, and that the trees would be better without it. I have seen a sessile oak standing out in brilliant foliage when every tree in the wood around was as bare of leaf as in winter."[1]
Mr. J. Smith, in the paper above referred to, pp. 29–30, confirms Mr. Lascelles' observations, and says that in 1888, which was the worst year for these caterpillars that he remembered, he passed through a wood composed of Q. sessiliflora in which, though it had been attacked by the caterpillars, they had left off, evidently either poisoned or starved. He also quotes a resident in the Forest of Dean who, writing in 1881, says: 'It was strikingly evident last summer that the Q. Robur pedunculata, or old English oak, was attacked by blight (? caterpillars) more severely than Q. R. sessiliflora"; and Mr. Baylis, who now has charge of Dean Forest, writes to me on the subject as follows:—"I can confirm the statement that the larva of the green oak moth defoliates Q. pedunculata, very much more than Q. sessiliflora, and I think the reason is this: the latter is the first to come into leaf, and the leaf has time to get fairly tough before the caterpillar has reached its most destructive stage, which is about the time that Q. pedunculata is coming into leaf.[2] I have very frequently noticed this fact that the oak with more decided pedunculate characters is almost invariably attacked rather than the other."
The only published exact observation that I know of with regard to the relative rate of growth of the two forms on the same soil is by Mr. H. Clinton Baker of Bayfordbury.[3] Near his house are growing on sandy loam, close to each other, a pedunculate oak raised in 1811 from the celebrated tree at Panshanger, and a sessile
- ↑ Sir Herbert Maxwell remarks, in litt., that though visitations of Tortrix are not common in Scotland, yet in June 1905 the oaks on the shore of Loch Awe and Loch Lomond, which are sessile, were stripped of their leaves by this pest.
- ↑ Usually Q. pedunculata is the first to come into leaf. Cf. p. 292.
- ↑ Gard. Chron. xxxvii 132 (1905).
