136 NOTES ON TREES. LDec. 



a park stretches from that point to the sea. Three fields off I had left 

 a vulgar flat, with its hedgerow Elms all mutilated and miserable, and 

 here was a place embedded in foliage. 



I had left behind a village devoid of taste, a pot-house place, with 

 a public-house one would not care to enter, and I had here reached an 

 embellished village with a capital inn. Blessings on the proprietors 

 of this place ! Looking out from a delicious bower, hidden among 

 honeysuckles and roses, in the garden of the inn, the residence of the 

 principal landowner is seen, standing amidst noble Elms. The Elm 

 grows fast on this rich diluvial soil, but such trees could hardly have 

 been produced in less than a hundred years. 



A thick belting was the first step here towards obtaining timber 

 and when once the prevailing wind had been planted out, the rest 

 was easy. Passing beyond the lodge gates I found a double avenue 

 of Elms leading to the house, and beyond it a park of 150 acres 

 doubled in apparent size by clumps of Elms, and bounded on the west 

 side by thick beltings. A pretty herd of forty Alderneys finds here 

 just the climate they prefer, with the sea at hand, as in the Channel 

 Islands, and on asking for their homestead I was taken into the 

 midst of what seemed an ornamental clump of hedged-in Elms. 

 Within I found the stockman's cottage, a byre, dairy and garden, 

 closed on all sides except the south, or rather south by east, by thick 

 Elm walls, sloping from the front to a height of 20 ft. The English 

 Elm is the best tree for seaside planting, except, perhaps, the 

 Ilex Oak, and in the whole of that district lying between "Worthing 

 and Portsmouth it is the chief defence of many a pleasing village. 

 The Elms were planted first, and, after the Elms, and sheltered by 

 them, came tlie less hardy trees and shrubs which grow in that fertile 

 district in profusion. 



This small-leaved English Elm [Ulmus campcstris) is the well 

 trodden and begrimed Elm of the London parks, a favourite of 

 academies, admired at Oxford and Cambridge, and in the precincts 

 of many of our most noted country houses. It was the Elm of 

 Pliny, and is still the Elm of Italy, and the common wayside trees 

 of France, the Pihine countries. Savoy and Switzerland. It forms 

 the avenues of Madrid at the Escurial, having been sent from 

 England by Philip II., though native probably in Spain. The tree 

 is Protean in type, varying in the leaf in different sites and soils, as 

 all travellers in the south of England must have noticed. It is 

 particularly plentiful in the valleys of the Thames and Severn, but it 

 grows everywhere south of the Trent ; more rarely north of it. In 

 the north it is undoubtedly an introduced tree ; in the south it was 

 long held to be a doubtful native, probably imported by the Piomans. 

 The imperfect ripening of a portion of the seeds cannot be accepted 

 as adverse evidence since, the same defect appears in Italy. 



