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Some account of the Botany of Wyre Forest and surrounding 
parts of the Country. By GuorcE JORDEN. 
More than fifty years I have wandered in forest and field, over 
mountain and moor, in highways and byeways, in dingle and dell, 
among brakes and bogs in Wyre Forest and neighbourhood, in 
search of the treasures of Flora. 
First in our interesting old hedges, which truthfully record the 
arboreal history of our primitive forests, in mutilated old stumps, 
which have weathered the blasts of more than a thousand win- 
ters, I find all the species, and some more, that now exist in the 
present Wyre Forest. 
In a very old hedge, which borders one of our roads which was 
first cut out of the wilderness, I find several specimens of Tilia 
parvifolia : I must seek for you elsewhere before you make your 
claim as a native of our ancient forest. I wandered in woods, by 
hedgerows, and on the rocky heights on both banks of the river 
Severn, over an area of more than fifty square miles, in Worcester- 
shire, Shropshire, and Staffordshire, where I find them plentifully 
dispersed, particularly in Astly and Shrawley Wood, an unre- 
claimed remnant of the Forest; here it covers a space of nearly 
two square miles, which was the nucleus of an extensive forest, 
where this species predominated, as the great number of very old 
pollards at this time testify ; a great number have been destroyed 
within these last sixty years. Those old pollards read to us some 
very interesting records of the past, when nothing but wood was 
burned on the hearths of our ancestors, and nothing else was 
used for the smelting of iron, which was carried on extensively 
in this neighbourhood. The forests were destroyed, and the land 
cultivated. Great numbers of Lime, Oak, and Ash were left 
and pollarded; each species points out the domain of their an- 
cestors,—the oaken pollards where the Oak predominated, the 
Ash but sparingly, the Tilias where they predominated; but the 
preference was given to them on account of their producing so 
much more wood than any others; they studded the fields very 
plentifully in the old hedges. Many of those old pollards, from 
medullary decay, are divided into several parts, in some instances 
into four or five; such is their tenacity of life, as to enable them 
to form again into distinct trees, leaving only remains of the 
sutures. This is not the case with the oaken pollards; a very 
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