NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS. 



WYCH HAZEL, OAKS, p. 5. My friend Mr. Menzies, Deputy- 

 Surveyor of Windsor Great Park, a great authority on forest 

 trees, kindly sends me the following note: 



The Wych Elm referred to at page 5 must have been a re- 

 markably fine one, and, judging by what I know of others, pro- 

 bably 500 years old. The Wych Elm is not nearly so common 

 as the English Elm. The distinguishing feature of the former 

 is its rough serrated leaf. The distinguishing feature of the 

 English Elm, especially under fifty years of age, is the cork-look- 

 ing excrescences upon the points of the branches, or, as 

 Shakespeare in " Midsummer-Night's Dream " has stamped it 

 past mistaking 



" The barky fingers of the Elm." 



The finest elms at Windsor and in the Playing Fields of Eton 

 are about 300 years old, and 15 feet in circumference ; but the 

 average age of an elm is about 100 years less than this. It is 

 not known -when the Wych Elm was introduced into Eng- 

 land if, indeed, it is not indigenous ; but it is believed the 

 Romans introduced the common elm when they brought the 

 vine, as the two are always associated in the Latin poets. Mr. 

 White sajs particularly that this Wych Elm must have been a 

 " I limited" tree. He does so because there was a great con- 

 troversy in his time and for many years afterwards as to whether 

 trees, especially oaks and all hard-wooded trees, which have a 

 tap-root in their youth, would grow to any size when trans- 

 planted from their original seed-bed. It has really only been 

 settled within the last thirty years, that transplanting young 

 trees is not of the slightest consequence if properly done, and 

 that the tap-root in them all is absorbed (like a tadpole's tail) 

 in a few years, and cutting it off makes no difference. No tree 



VOL. II. D 



