272 
FLORA AND SYLVA 
Wood. 
The wood of the Wych Elm 
differs from that of the Field 
Elm and is in general inferior to it. It 
is less hard, less heavy, and less durable, 
with a coarser grain and much less heart- 
wood of a paler colour. Though tough 
and springy and therefore less ready to 
splinter, it is more apt to split in the grain 
especially in drying, and for this reason 
is avoided by wheel- 
wrights for their best 
work, though sometimes 
used for wheelbarrows 
and lighter carts, par- 
ticularly in Scotland 
Flowering Stray and Leak of the Wvch Elm 
where the wood is abundant. Its light- 
ness, elasticity, and straight grain, fit 
it for many uses in carpentry, as floor- 
ing, and for the lower parts of vessels. 
Steamed it becomes increasingly supple, 
and is then used in boat-building. Cabi- 
net-makers find employment for the 
finer grains as veneer, especially the 
twisted and knotty trunks which when 
fully seasoned give richly streaked and 
coloured sections. As fuel the wood 
is poor, burning slowly and with little 
flame. In parts of Europe where herb- 
age is scarce the leafy shoots are fed to 
cattle, while coarse ropes are made of 
the tough inner fibres of the bark. The 
quantity of timber in old trees is often 
large. One mentioned by Evelyn as cut 
down in Staffordshire — once famous 
for its vast Wych Elms — yielded 97 
tons of timber ; another, described by 
White of Selbourne, and which had 
previously lost its finest limb, gave 8 
full loads of sound timber. 
The origin of the name Wych Elm 
has been a matter of dispute, but Prior 
traces it to the use of this wood for 
making the massive chests — wyches^ or 
whycches — in which winter provisions 
were stored in olden times, 
and though a secondary 
meaning connecting it with 
folk-lore and protection 
from witches seems to have 
gr)wn up around the old 
name, quotations from old 
authors prove this to have 
been its early use. Another 
old name, that of Witch- 
hazel, still retained by this 
tree in some country dis- 
tricts but now given to Hamamelis^ 
arose from the similarity between the 
leaf of the Scotch Elm and that of the 
Common Hazel. 
It is a tree which is not averse to 
t^n life, and we have seen some very 
fine trees of it, in both the natural and 
the drooping forms, in the London parks 
and suburban gardens. RUSTICUS. 
References. — Evelyn's Silva, vol. i, p. 115 ; Loudon, 
Arboretum, vol. 3, p. 1398 ; Selby, Forest Trees, p. 124 ; 
Mouillefert, Essences Forestiere, p. 166 ; Mathieu, Flore 
Forestiere, p. 302 ; Laslett, Timber Trees, p. 159 ; 
Mathew, Naval Timber and Arboriculture, p. 50 ; and 
many notes in Woods and Forests. 
