34 GARDENS PAST AND PRESENT 



also juniper and box, which shared with the beech 

 the chalk ridges and hollows of the south. The 

 stern northern mountains produced the hardy pine, 

 and the spruce may have found its way across the 

 sea and settled itself in the moister lowlands ; but 

 the birch feared nor cold nor storm, and clung to 

 bleak hillsides. Besides these, few other native 

 trees of importance can be called to mind which 

 furnished the huge tracts of forest of those early 

 days. As before said, there is every reason to 

 believe that elm and fruiting chestnut were not 

 indigenous, though they were naturalised within 

 the first two or three centuries of our history. 

 Tangled thickets abounded, where lesser trees 

 found place wild crab and pear and hazel, with 

 field maple and white beam on the chalk ; while 

 sallows and alders and poplars of more than one 

 kind marked the course of the larger rivers as 

 well as of the streams and brooklets which had 

 forced a channel through the ooze of ever-present 

 swamps. From very early times, and onwards 

 for hundreds of years, vast stretches of forest and 

 moor were given up to herds of fallow deer, which 

 roamed at will and, if truth were told, devastated 

 the country while they fattened on the crops of 

 the hardly won fields. A park, to the modern 

 mind, suggests the stately surrounding of a stately 

 mansion, with sheltering plantations and groups 

 and clumps of fine trees, natural and exotic, planted 

 for shade and ornament a feature of the English 

 countryside which could ill be spared. But the 

 grievances of the early centuries were very great 

 and culminated at length in the sixteenth when 



