OBITUARY. 245 



times urged his views on his hearer without giving him an 

 opportunity to express his own, a faihng not uncommon in those 

 of masterful intellect in whom the sense of humour is, perhaps, 

 somewhat deficient. He had difificulty in realising the point of 

 view of others; no one was more ready to acknowledge their 

 achievements in his publications, but the judgments he ex- 

 pressed of the character of men, or the merits of plants, were 

 sometimes precipitate and prejudiced. A charming characteristic 

 was his readiness to admit when he was wrong, and he 

 combined a chivalrous courtesy with a self-assertiveness which 

 those who did not know him well were apt to misjudge. No 

 sketch of Elwes' life should omit mention of his amazing powers 

 of assimilation of knowledge, and of his prodigious memory. 

 He seemed to absorb information through his faculties of vision, 

 both of books and things, rather than by listening to the spoken 

 word. 



As a West Country squire the handsome, burly figure of Elwes 

 was well known, in the hunting field and elsewhere, among 

 his more stay-at-home neighbours. His estate of Colesborne, 

 in the Cotswolds is, unfortunately, situated for the most part 

 on the cold Oolitic formation of that district, and he deplored, 

 as indeed we all may, that he possessed no acres of Green- 

 sand or Old Red Sandstone on which to make his plantations 

 and pinetum. Had such been available, it is safe to say 

 that his would by now have been the most complete 

 collection of trees hardy in Great Britain. In a frosty valley 

 near his house he formed a "Centenary Plantation" of trees 

 of many species grown from seed mostly collected in this 

 country in 1900, a year remarkable for the ripening of tree 

 seeds of all kinds. Here careful temperature and other 

 records have been kept, and the origin of the trees in each 

 plot is known. (A full account of it by H. A. Pritchard 

 appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Forestry, 191 1, page 220.) 

 It was a delight to Elwes to show his guests the results, and 

 he was as much interested in, and as careful to point out, 

 the failures as the successes. Truth to tell, the former were 

 almost as numerous as the latter. In his garden, however, he 

 was more fortunate. His glass-houses were full of plants 

 rarely seen elsewhere in cultivation, many of them introduced 

 by himself. 



In 1890 his friend Max Leichtlin gave him his collection of 



