114 



IRISH GARDENING. 



would have supposed that here and there a 

 wood might escape, or that at any rate the 

 unsaleable trees would be left standinjj. It 

 seems almost incredible, to those who have not 

 studied the laws of forestry, that so utterly and 

 completely have these great forests been anni- 

 hilated that, so far as I am aware, there is not 

 a mountain side in all Ireland on which one 

 single tree of our original Irish pine grows 

 to-day. 



Carefully preserved in his demesne at Done- 

 raile Lord'Castletown has some grand trees for 

 which he claims an unstained lineage, and these, 

 so far as I know, are the only trees in Ireland for 

 which this claim is made. And what splendid 

 forests they were, that gave our country her 

 name of "the Island of Woods! " Away down on 

 the plains and in the valleys there was plenty of 

 open land, and here were the towns and settle- 

 ments, and here, also, was the restlessness 

 and strife and endless bloodshed of early Irish 

 history ; but up on the hill-sides stood the great 

 silent forests, with only the highest and most 

 exposed mountain peaks jutting up through the 

 all-pervading pine tops, and among those pine 

 trees, in contrast to the turmoil below, that 

 complete and utter solitude and calm that is 

 only to be found in primeval forests. The 

 " Rest " of which the late Percy Somers Payne 

 wrote : — 



" Down where the broad Zambesi river 



Glides away iiilo some shadowy lag-oon 

 Lies the antelope, and hears the leaflets quiver, 



Shaken by the sultry breath of noon ; 

 Hears the slug-gish water ripple in its flowing-, 



Feels the atmosphere with iragrance all opprest, 

 Dreams his dreams, and the sweetest is the knowing 



That above him, and around him, there is rest." 



But to return to our bog deal. The Irish 

 pine, as I have called it, is* botanically identical 

 with Pinus sylvcsii'is, the "Scots" or 

 " Scotch " pine or fir, as it is commonly called, 

 a tree whose habitat ranges from Western 

 Ireland all across Northern Europe and away 

 out into vague Siberia, and the timber of which, 

 shipped to us from North Russian ports as 

 "red deal," is unsurpassed for building pur- 

 poses, and commands a very high and fast 

 increasing price. "Scotch" fir is, of course, 

 a misnomer ; it ought to be "Scots" fir, and 

 Ireland, we all know, was called "the land of 

 the Scots" before the name Scotland was ever 

 heard of. All the same, I think Professor 

 Fisher is right in insisting on calling this tree 

 the "common fir." 



How the bog deal got into the bottom of the 

 bogs or how the bogs got on to the top of the 

 bog deal is a puzzle to most people. The local 

 "scholars" will tell you that the decaying 

 branches and leaves of the forest piled up into 

 bog in the course of unknown centuries, but 

 they are rather put to it to explain twenty feet 



of turf over the stumps of the former forest, 

 and especially when those stumps, as is often 

 the case, are found all wind-blown, and there- 

 fore an unproductive factor, at the bottom. 



The truth, as I make it, is, that so long as 

 forests exist on any land you will have a deposit 

 of vegetable humus, but you will never have 

 bog there. If, however, the forest is burned 

 or blown down, or even cut down, conditions 

 are frequently set up (depending chiefly on the 

 lack of drainage) that cause bog to grow. 



It is for this reason that we find the roots of 

 the trees, which were buried in the ground at 

 the time of the clearing of the forest, so sound 

 and fresh that the pink inside bark looks and 

 smells as though from a growing tree, yet the 

 trunk and branches which were exposed to the 

 atmosphere have utterly rotted away before the 

 peat had time to cover and preserve them. 

 Those trunks that we do find, rare in comparison 

 to the number of stumps, probably fell into soft 

 ground, and were thus submerged and protected. 

 We often see several strata of tree stumps in 

 the face of a bog with a layer of peat between 

 each of them. 



Here, after the first denudation, the bog 

 began to grow, covering up the first set of 

 stumps. Then little seedling pines crept out 

 over it from some wood near by, and as they 

 throve they dried the bog, but they in their 

 turn were swept away, and again the bog 

 accumulated moisture and grew, till again the 

 brave little trees got a foothold on it — and so on. 

 Some of the logs of bog deal that are dug 

 out are very fine trees (as are the great bog 

 oaks), and the timber in them, though stained 

 to dull brown by the bog acids, is as sound as 

 the day they fell. 



The oaks all split to pieces as they dry out, 

 so that it is hard even to get pieces big enough 

 for the carved photograph frames, and pigs of 

 commerce, many of which never saw the inside 

 of a bog, and, I am afraid, are not so black as they 

 are painted. The resinous bog deal, however, 

 if it splits at all, only does so lengthvvays, and 

 first rate boards can be cut from it. As a rule 

 it has been slow grown, much slower than our 

 modern trees, presumably owing to dense crowd- 

 ing. I have counted 220 annual rings on a log 

 squaring only 14 inches. Such trees would 

 equal in quality the very highest-priced red deal 

 that we import, and the value of these woods, 

 if they could have been preserved under judicious 

 treatment, would run into so many hundreds of 

 millions of pounds that I do not like to think of 

 what we have lost. Fortunately this is not a 

 matter for recriminations. The mistake, whose 

 ever it was, is as old as the bog deal itself, 

 and the authors of it are as dead and buried ; 

 but it is up to us now, as our friends across the 

 water say, to see if we can reproduce some, at 



