180 OUR FORESTS AND WOODLANDS 



But more graphic still is Scott's couplet, telling 

 how, as the Last Minstrel rode along, 



* He passed where Newark's stately tower 

 Looks out from Yarrow's birchen bower.' 



The most graceful and delicately beautiful of 

 all our forest trees, it is at the same time one of 

 the hardiest. Indeed, but for the aspen, it would 

 be absolutely the very hardiest of all of them. 

 The only other of our forest trees which can at 

 all compare with it in power of accommodating 

 themselves to poor soils and to extreme varia- 

 tions of summer warmth and wintry cold, are 

 the Scots pine and the aspen; and the latter is 

 the only tree whose geographical distribution, 

 throughout 35 of latitude and 140 of longi- 

 tude, exceeds that of the birch. As regards its 

 power of accommodating itself to different kinds 

 of poor soil, nothing can well be added to what 

 Evelyn wrote when he said of the birch that the 

 land on which it is possible to grow it * cannot 

 well be too barren ; for it will thrive both in 

 the dry, and the wet, Sand and Stony, Marshes 

 and Bogs ; the water-falls^ and uliginous parts of 

 Forests that hardly bear any grass, do many 



