The Story of our English Woodlands. 59 



tracted Kalm's attention when, fresh from the pines of his 

 Swedish home, he was sailing up to port in the Thames, were 

 the " leaf woods " which clothed the hills on each side, and 

 later on he especially mentions the absence of firs in either 

 Essex or Herts.^ 



In or about 1750, William Ellis, a gentleman farmer of 

 Little Gaddesden, whom Kalm describes as neglectful of his 

 profession on account of his assiduity for literary distinction,^ 

 published an important work on arboriculture, entitled The 

 Timber Tree Improved, in which the value of, and proper soil 

 for, the different kinds of forest trees are considered ; and ten 

 years later Thomas Hill, gardener to Lord Manners, wrote a 

 treatise on husbandry, in which he shows how to prepare land, 

 and raise upon it plants to produce both poles and timber. 



In 1760 a Scotch agriculturist raised an alarm that the 

 national fuel supply was coming to an end. The turf and peat 

 from the mosses was, he asserted, diminishing rapidly, and so 

 he implored the landlords to turn their attention to the plant- 

 ing of firs as a more lucrative and less easily exhaustible form 

 of fuel. He pointed out that, by thus utilising a Scots acre of 

 waste ground, there would be, besides a large supply of fuel 

 from the annual thinnings, some 2,050 trees left at three-yard 

 intervals, which at the age of thirty years would be capable 

 of serving a single family as firewood for 20| years. Almost 

 simultaneously, an Englishman drew public attention to the 

 alarming scarcity of oak for all those multifarious purposes to 

 which it is indispensable. Accordingly, we find about this 

 period that public nurseries for rearing forest trees were 

 established both in England and Scotland. Kalm, describing 

 the market gardening in the London suburbs, talks of gardeners 

 who make it only their business to keep " tras choler," i.e. 

 nurseries in which were all kinds of young trees. ^ He par- 

 ticularly notices such about Chelsea ; * and Miller, one of 

 its inhabitants, published in 1730 a catalogue of trees and 

 shrubs which bear the open climate of England. Boucher, an 



* Kalm's England, Translation of J. Lucas, 1892, pp. 6 and 214. 



* Id. Ibid., p. 192. * Id. Ibid., p. 25. " Id. Ibid., p. 90. 



