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FLORA AND SYLVA. 



a good shelter for rickyards, and serves to break ! falling, and the Ash, Hornbeam, and Wych 

 the force of the wind over crops. In Holland ' Elm are pollarded for poles; the knotted heads 

 and Belgium the long rows of round-headed of this last are also very beautiful for cabinet 

 Willows stretch for miles across the marshy , work. The Mulberry trees in North Italy are 

 meadows, and are the only objects that arrest pollarded every year ; the young shoots and 

 the eye on these interminable flats, unless it be leaves are given as food to the silkworms, and 



a windmill or a church steeple in the misty 

 distance. 



The trunks of these pollard Willows are 

 very interesting studies to the naturalist and 

 theartist, forthe young heads often grow upon 

 very old shoulders. The wood in the centre 



the stems form supports for the vines, which 

 are festooned from one tree to another down 

 each side of the long patches of corn or lentils. 



In some parts of Suffolk, and no doubt in 

 other counties, the Oaks have been much pol- 

 larded, and some of the finest Oaks we have 



generally decays and makes a favourite nesting | ever seen have been so cut in past times, as also 

 ground for birds and for boring caterpillars. 

 Seeds are blown or dropped on the top, and 



send their roots first into this decayed wood, 

 and finally through it into the ground, so that 

 one may often see a large Elder, a young Ash 

 tree, a Gooseberry bush, or a mass of Dog Rose 

 or Bramble springing up among the Willow 

 boughs. The Willow itself will even form roots 

 at the crown and send them down to the soil 

 through its own hollow trunk. In this tangled 

 mass wood-pigeons and doves make their nests, 

 and under the projecting head, scarred and 

 swollen with the wounds of years, wrens hang 

 their little covered houses, built of the same 

 moss that covers the trunk. In the rotten wood 



were Yew trees. P. 



MAGNOLIA CAMPBELLII * 

 I have known this most beautiful of all 

 flowering shrubs that are natives of tem- 

 perate climates ever since itfirst bloomed 

 in Europe many years ago in the garden 

 of my late friend, W. H. Crawford of 

 Lakelands, near Cork. It is perfectly 

 hardy, but has unfortunately the great 

 drawback of requiring a mild spring 

 and the absence of late frosts to enable 

 it to expand its beautiful flowers, which 



small woodpeckers and wrynecks make their j appear before the leaves and have no 

 neat round borings, tenanted in after years by protection save the bud-sheath, which 



tomtits and other birds, and I have found the 

 nests of sand martins, where there was no 

 available sandbank handy, in the dry tinder- 

 like wood exposed by the splitting of an old 

 pollard. 



The trees represented by the illustration 

 are comparatively young, and the branches 

 which are being lopped are only the growth 

 of five or six years at the most. When older 

 the trunks generally split and lean either to- 



falls away when the flower-bud begins 

 to swell. It may be counted on to bloom 

 about every third or fourth year, flower- 

 ing very freely when it does so, my tree 

 having produced 147 fine flowers in 

 the spring of 1902 and not one in either 

 1903 or 1904. I am in hopes of having 

 some flowers next year, but shall not be 



wards the water, or away from the direction surprised if it does not flower again till 



1906. The much older and taller spe- 

 cimen in the splendid Arboretum of my 

 neighbour, Lord Barrymore, on Fota 

 Island, was a most beautiful sight in the 

 spring of 1902, when it bore nearly 300 

 flowers. As its wood is unfortunately 

 extremely brittle and likely to snap off 



of the prevailing winds like the Apple trees 

 in an old orchard. They then become very 

 picturesque, assuming quaint forms and often 

 dividing into two distinct masses. Although 

 the Willow is the commonest of pollard trees, 

 others are also polled for various reasons and 

 uses. The Lombardy Poplar, for instance,when 

 planted as a protection round buildings, is often 

 pollarded in order to prevent danger from its 



With coloured plate from a drawing by H. G. Moon at Belgrove, Queenstown. 



