Remarkable Trees
Large hornbeams are not at all common, and exist so far as I have seen in comparatively few places, mostly old parks. The largest and finest that I know of, though by no means the tallest, is near the reservoir at Cornbury Park, Oxford, where there is a tree whose height I could not measure exactly, though it probably exceeds 75 feet, with a bole 11 feet 10 inches in girth and 12 to 14 feet long, which spreads out at that height into an immense number of branches covering a circle of 95 paces (Plate 148). There are two other trees of nearly similar size and habit on the north side of the beech avenue, one of them leaning very much on one side with drooping branches. Sir Hugh Beevor has recently measured a tree, 100 feet in height and 9 feet 8 inches in girth, on Sir Robert Dashwood's property near West Wycombe.
But there is no place where I have seen hornbeams so tall or so numerous as at Cobham Park, Kent, where there must be hundreds of trees 70 to 80 feet high, and many with clean boles 20 to 4o feet long. Among so many it is hard to say which are the largest, but one which I measured near the old heronry, and not far from the ash grove, was over 90 feet high, dividing at about 7 feet into four stems, each of which ran up straight and clean for about 40 feet. Another, a pollard, hollow on one side, measured 13 feet 6 inches in girth, These grow on a soil which suits the ash perfectly. Four shoots from a stool in a wood here measured 76 feet high and 2 to 3 feet in girth,
At Mersham-le-Hatch, Ashford, Kent, the seat of Sir Wyndham Knatchbull, Bart., I saw, in 1907, a remarkable wood called Bockhanger, composed of very old pollard hornbeams many of which are hollow and much decayed. They grow on a sandy loam, covered in spring with bluebells, and have for generations served to supply the mansion with firewood, of which the steward told me twelve to fourteen cords were annually consumed. The largest of these trees was about 16 feet to the crown, and had a very large kidney-shaped wen on one side, over which it measured 16 feet 4 inches in girth. Another tree here showed the remarkable power of the hornbeam in repairing wounds in its trunk. A large double-stemmed tree, widely split and hollow at the base, had higher up completely covered the open cleft with young healthy wood and bark in the same way that old yews often do.
A most remarkable hornbeam, on account of its very wide-spreading branches, grows in Fredville Park, Kent, and though not over 35 to 40 feet high, covers an area of no less than 103 paces round. It has about fifteen main branches which show the characteristic irregularities that old hornbeams always have. The branches are so thick that foxes often choose the crown of this tree as a lair, and when covered with fruit, as it was when I saw it in June 1907, it is a most striking and beautiful tree. It grows in a deep fertile loam overlying chalk, but rather wet in winter.
The hornbeam is, in Essex, especially in Epping Forest, most commonly seen as a pollard, the practice of lopping the branches for firewood having been very general in old times. A photograph showing the appearance of the tree when so
