December ist, 1903. 



"JffflTNESS of the hot chase after process illustrations, small type, 

 tin-shine paper, smudge lithographs, tomb -stone weights, and the 

 less delightful features of modern books, the spirit of old things began 

 to move in me and led at last to my going to the printer, who did not 

 at first see my meaning. Sol went home for Baskerville s Virgil, and 

 asked him to get as near to it as he could in type, went with flower 

 drawings to the best colour -printer in Europe ; to the paper mills that 

 still make real paper, and found surviving a wood-engraver who under- 

 stood my good artist's drawings, and so began. 



As regards the plan of Flora and Sylva, it struck me that 

 periodicals of this kind had always been over much devoted to flowers 

 and plants as distinct from trees and shrubs, while every day of my life 

 I see more and more the beauty and value of the tree. So I married 

 Flora to Sylva — a pair not far apart in Nature, only in books. 

 The flowers are as the lovely clouds that pass over an alpine range, 

 the trees as the cliffs and mountains that remain. 



When we think of the beauty, use, and long life of trees, and the 

 happy results a man who plants may get in his own lifetime, there can 

 be but one view as to the importance of the subject, and hence the place 

 given them in this work. In the series of articles on the Greater Trees 

 of the Northern Forest it is proposed to include all the nobler trees. 



W. R. 



Gravetye Manor. 



