OBITUARY. 193 



OBITUARY. 



The Earl of Ducie. 



In the death of the third Earl of Ducie, on October 27th, we 

 lost the doyen of British arboriculturists. He died at his place 

 in Gloucestershire, Tortworth Court, in his ninety-fourth year. 

 For thp past two or three years he had been too much of an 

 invalid to take pleasure in the wonderful arboretum of his own 

 planting, but up to the close of 191 7 his interest and enthusiasm 

 for his trees remained as keen as ever. In December 1915, he 

 wrote to me that he had just sold for ^^1400 a larch wood, 

 planted by himself in 1854, which he thought was probably a 

 unique achievement. 



He was President of the Royal Scottish Arboricultural Society 

 as long ago as 1857, and was doubtless the father of our Society. 

 In July 1917, he wrote of some of his favourite rare trees, such 

 as Quercus Mirbeckii and Nothofagus obliqua, and how they had 

 fared in that warm summer following a winter of almost un- 

 precedented severity, and finished his letter by saying that he 

 was now father of an unconscionable number of bodies, including 

 the House of Lords, Brooks' Club, the Privy Council, the 

 Lord Lieutenants, and the Geological Society, but that he did 

 not feel the burden of such parenthood ! 



Lord Ducie acquired his planting tastes to a large extent by 

 reason of his friendship with the late Mr R. S. Holford of 

 Westonbirt, in his own county, and from the then Lord Somers 

 and Sir Philip Egerton, who had been enthusiastic planters 

 of trees for many years before Lord Ducie succeeded to 

 Tortworth in 1853. The Westonbirt arboretum is the only 

 rival in Gloucestershire to that at Tortworth. 



Of Lord Ducie's collection of splendid specimens of trees, 

 many of them little known elsewhere in this country, this is no 

 occasion to speak ; anyone who has seen them will not forget 

 the remarkable examples of such beautiful and rare things as 

 Abies bracteata, A. firma, Castanopsis chrysophylla, Quercus 

 Kelloggii, Aesculus indica, A. turbinata, all of which have borne 

 good fruit at Tortworth for many years, and innumerable other 

 things of equal interest. It is a cause of great regret that he never 

 could bring himself to have the collection properly catalogued, 



VOL. XXXV. PART IL N 



