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 ‘Ae 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 
