18S3.] NOTES ON TREES. 1;J7 



Although tlie small-leaved Elm grows fastest on good ground, it 

 affects poor soils as well as rich, and abounds everywhere in groves 

 and hedgerows. It is, as I have said, in speaking of coast planting, 

 an admirable shelter tree, and an excellent nurse. It needs no 

 pruning, but it will submit to great brutality in that respect, and 

 suffers topping and lopping patiently till it becomes a naked stem 

 surmounted by a bush. It bears transplanting well, and it will bear, 

 too, a burden of many feet of earth about its trunk, which would kill 

 any other tree by burying the roots too deep. The timber is most 

 useful for naval purposes, blocks, dead eyes, and other furniture of 

 the rigging. It never cracks nor splits. The foliage — massive, but 

 not too heavy, with bright green leaf — is the first to afford shade in 

 spring and the last to assume the yellow tint of autumn. 



The Wych Elm is a fortnight later in coming into leaf than the 

 other, has much larger leaves, does not throw up suckers, ripens seed 

 freely, is less pyramidal in growth, and loses its central column 

 with mature growth, spreading with divergent limbs, a magnificent 

 head, and rampant, heavy foliage, which becomes pendulous, and 

 hangs in rich festoons. It delights in the glens and denes of Scot- 

 land, in rich, loose soil, formed by the debris of rocks, and in moist 

 alluvial ravines, drained by a stream into whose current it sends its 

 tough roots. Huge excrescences frequently cover the trunk. Gilbert 

 White describes a Wych Elm with eight loads of timber, measuring 

 24 ft. at seven feet above the ground. The Trysting Elm in Teviot- 

 dale measured 30 ft. at four feet from the ground. Fifty years 

 since, Evelyn measured a Wych Elm at Bagot's Park, 120 ft. long, 

 weighing 97 tons. Its diameter was 17 ft. at the ground. 



An extraordinary Elm at Crawley measures 70 ft. in height, by 

 35 ft. round the hollow of the trunk, which forms a chamber in 

 which a dozen may dine. Two hundred persons have dined at tables 

 set beneath the branches of one of the largest thriving Wych Elms 

 in England, at East Sheen, the height being 110 ft. Elms dislike 

 smoke, and Sir Francis Bacon's trees in Gray's Inn Walks, planted in 

 1600, were decayed within 120 years, and replaced with plant's. The 

 Elms of the Long Walk at Windsor are now in their prime at 150 

 years old. Even when leafless — off duty, so to speak, and no longer 

 in the parade of their full foliage — they are beautiful. The synonyms 

 of the Wych Elm (Vlmus montana) are the Mountain or Scotch Elm. 

 Its favourite sites — since I have not particularly mentioned them 

 before — are river sides, and wherever water can penetrate freely 

 through the soil. On dry gravels and clays, or on soils with a chill, 

 stiff and poor subsoil, it may thrive for a time, but the stunted form, 

 and the yellow hue of sickness will finally expose the error of the 

 planter in selecting the wrong tree for the site. If it be planted too 

 thickly with other trees, it exterminates them by its shade, owing to 



