vi INTRODUCTION 



produce have been seriously imperilled owing to the 

 failure of imports from the Continent and elsewhere 

 on which basket-makers and willow-workers have 

 hitherto relied for half their consumption. This defect 

 in the national resources is the more to be deplored 

 in that no country in the world is better adapted for 

 the cultivation of commercial willows than our own; 

 and no crop, granting intelligent and skilful treatment, 

 affords a more profitable return to the grower. Indeed, 

 the elder Pliny in his Historia Naturalis (1. xvi, c. 69) 

 remarks that Cato held an osier bed in higher esti- 

 mation than an olive plantation or than wheat or 

 meadow land. 



The writer of the present Introduction is able to 

 assure those concerned, from half a century's practical 

 experience as a basket -maker and dealer in willows, 

 that the responsible author of the ensuing treatise, 

 Mr. W. P. Ellmore of Leicester, is second to none in 

 this country in possessing the expert knowledge and 

 matured judgment necessary to warrant the publica- 

 tion of a work of this nature knowledge and judgment 

 based not only on English methods, but on those 

 adopted by continental growers in Belgium, Holland, 

 France and Germany. 



A relevant word which the present writer alone is 

 responsible for may not be inopportune. From time 

 immemorial commercial willows have been exclusively 

 propagated from cuttings, and the curious may learn 

 from Columella's De re Rustica (1. iv, c. 30) that the 

 methods employed in ancient Roman times for the 

 propagation and cultivation of osiers are substantially 

 those described in the present treatise. So enfeebled, 

 therefore, have the stocks become by artificial methods 

 of reproduction that the rods fall an easy prey to 



