The Flora of England 



for that is the title of my paper. I said that 

 Britain was in many parts covered with extensive 

 forests ; for what was said of Buckinghamshire in 

 the eleventh century, abundabant eo tempore nemora 

 spatiosa densa et copiosa, must have been the case 

 to a much larger extent all over England a 

 thousand years earlier, though it is known that 

 the Romans cut down large tracts of forest for 

 military purposes. This abundance of forests no 

 longer remains to us, but the trees of which they 

 consisted are the same. Among these the oak 

 would be, as it is now, the monarch of English 

 trees ; and it was probably the most abundant, 

 for it is almost certain that the great forests were 

 oak forests. But the ash must have been almost 

 as abundant, and far more abundant in the country 

 south of the Trent than it is now ; this is shown 

 by the large number of places in southern England 

 which get their names from the ash, but in which 

 the ash is no longer the leading tree, and in many 

 of them it is almost extinct. These were pro- 

 bably the two chief forest trees of Southern 

 England in the earlier period I have named ; 

 among the less important trees were the birch, 

 the alder, the wych-elm (in the north more 

 abundantly), the maple, the willow, and perhaps 

 the yew. These are generally now considered to 

 be truly indigenous and have old British names ; 

 and among smaller trees the holly and the moun- 

 tain ash were probably abundant, the holly cer- 

 tainly, but the mountain ash more abundant in 



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