The Story of our English Woodlands. 49 



Hatton's residence at Kirby, as " a very noble house, built a la 

 mod erne ; the garden and stables agreeable, but the avenue 

 ungraceful, and the seate naked " ; or wrote of Suffolk House, 

 that " the new front towards the gardens is tollerable, were it 

 not drowTied by a too niassie and clomsie pair of stayres of 

 stone, without any neate invention ; " and of Hampton Court 

 (much as he admired it), that " All these gardens might be 

 exceedingly improved, as being too narrow for the palace." 



On October 15th, 1662, we find the following entry : " I this 

 day deliv'rd my Discourse concerning forest trees to the 

 Society, upon occasion of certain queries sent to us by the 

 Commissioners of His Majesty's Navy, being the first booke 

 that was printed by order of the Society, and by their printer 

 since it was a Corporation." 



But Evelyn's Sylva was not intended to encourage merely 

 the ornamentation of landed estates, laudable though this 

 object undoubtedly was ; it was designed rather to set forth 

 the pecuniary advantages which would accrue to the entire 

 nation from a universal system of careful forestry. 



The greatly increased demand for oak, for both ship and 

 house building, as we have already said, was giving a new 

 impulse to arboriculture, and attracting not only the attention 

 of private individuals, but of the Government. Hence the 

 importance attached by the Eoyal Society to Evelyn's great 

 literary attempt. Plantations for purposes of fuel and timber 

 had been common at the time of the Conquest, had slowly fallen 

 into disuse until the sixteenth century, had then been languidly 

 revived,^ and were now to receive fresh impetus from Evelyn's 

 treatise. It was not until the beginning of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, however, that any extensive system of arboriculture was 

 practised in Scotland, and it was later still before the Irish 

 devoted much attention to the subject. In France and Gler- 

 many, however, the scientific culture of woods and forests had 

 preceded, by some considerable period, any action of a similar 

 nature in these islands. 



Before Evelyn's book appeared, English arboriculturists had 



1 Holinshed tells us that, in the reign of Henry VIII., plantations of 

 trees began to be made for purposes of iitility. 



n. B 



