250 A HUNDRED YEARS 



plantations here would fare now from tlie rabbit plague, 

 and the roe, and the red deer. 



I planted very few of the rarer trees to begin with. 

 Wellingtonias were then the rage, and I felt bound to 

 invest in four of them, and planted them in the best 

 sites I could find near the house. I tried to make pits for 

 them. I took out the little peat there was, but how well 

 I remember the clicks the spades gave when we came to 

 the bed-rock ! Next morning (the night having been 

 wet) all we had produced were four small ponds, and I 

 had to get an old man to bring me creels of rather better 

 soil for them on his back from a distance. I have just 

 measured my Wellingtonias. In the forty -three years 

 of their existence they have made some sixty-six feet 

 of growth, and are about eight feet in circumference six 

 feet from the ground, and their strong leaders show they 

 are still going ahead. So much for the old man and his 

 creels of soil ! 



Silver firs in the hollows have done well, and some of 

 them also are sixty to seventy feet high. One thing 

 has surprised me very much — viz., that oaks, of which 

 I planted but few, thinking it was the last place where 

 oaks would thrive, are very nearly level with the firs, 

 larches, and beeches. 



It was only after the plantation on the peninsula had 

 been growing fifteen or twenty years, and was making 

 good shelter, that I began cutting out some of the 

 commoner stuff, especially my enemies the " shop '* 

 Scots firs, as I call them, which continued more or less 

 to get blasted by the gales of the ocean. Then it was I 

 began planting all sorts of things in the cleared spaces — 



