268 ENGLISH BOTANY. 
single trees, or in a judicious group, but generally in close compact bodies, in thick 
array, which suffocates or cramps them, and, if ever they get loose from this bondage, 
they are already ruined. Their lateral branches are gone, and their stems are drawn 
into poles, on which their heads appear stuck as on a centre; whereas, if the tree 
had been grown in its natural state, all mischief had been prevented ; its stem would ~ 
have taken an easy sweep, and its lateral branches, which naturally grow with almost 
as much beautiful irregularity as those of deciduous trees, would have hung loosely 
and negligently, and the more so, as there is something peculiarly light and feathery 
in its foliage.” He adds, “The Scotch fir in perfection I think a very fine tree, 
though we have little idea of its beauty, and it is generally treated with contempt. 
It is a hardy plant, and is therefore put to every servile office. If you wish to screen 
your house from the south-west wind, plant Scotch firs, and plant them close and 
thick. If you want to shelter a nursery of young trees, plant Scotch firs, and the 
phrase is, you may afterwards weed them out as you please. This is ignominions. 
I wish not to rob society of these hardy services from the Scotch fir, nor do I mean to 
set it in competition with many trees of the forest which, in their infant state, it is 
accustomed to shelter. All I mean is, to rescue it from the disgrace of being thought 
fit for nothing else, and to establish its character as a picturesque tree.” Sir T. D. 
Lauder agrees with Mr. Gilpin in his approbation of the Scotch fir, and Mr. Loudon 
says that he has seen it towering in full majesty in the midst of some appropriate 
Highland scene, and sending its limbs abroad with all the unconstrained freedom of 
a hardy mountaineer, as if it claimed dominion over the savage regions around it, and 
he has looked upon it as a very sublime object. People who have not seen it in its 
native climate and soil, and who judge of it from the wretched abortions which are 
swaddled and suffocated in English plantations, in deep, heavy, and eternally wet 
clays, may well call it a wretched tree; but when its foot is among its own Highland 
heather, and when it stands freely on its native knoll of dry gravel or thinly-covered 
rock, over which its roots wander far in the wildest reticulation, whilst its tall, 
furrowed, and often gracefully sweeping red and grey trunk of enormous circum- 
ference rears aloft its high umbrageous canopy, then would the greatest sceptic on 
this point be compelled to prostrate his mind before it with a veneration which per- 
haps was never before excited in him by any other tree. Milton writes of the pine- 
tree. Speaking of the fallen angels, he says :— 
“ Paithfal, now they stood, 
Their glory withered ; as when heaven’s fire 
Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines, 
With singed top their stately growth, though bare, 
Stands on the blasted heath.” 
The pine is the badge of the clan Mac Gregor, and, according to “ The Lady of the 
« Lake,” of the Mac Alpines also :— 
“ Hail to the chief who in triumph advances ! 
Honoured and blest be the evergreen pine! 
Long may the tree in his banner that glances 
Flourish, the shelter and grace of our line.” 
And again Sir Walter Scott writes :-— 
« And higher yet the pine-tree hung 
His shatter’d trunk, and frequent flung, 
Where seem’d the cliffs to meet on high, 
His boughs athwart the narrow’d sky ” 7 
