THE FOREST TREES OF BRITAIN. 
471 
elme, saving that they be tenderer : among 1 bignesses of ciches (vetches), in which is con- 
these hang certain triangled things, upon tained the fruit or seed. The root is strong 
which are found knaps, or little buds of the I and thicke.' 
" Evelyn is loud in his praises of the horn- 
beam ; for the tree being, as it is called, 
* tonsile,' or very patient of being clipped by 
the shears, it was highly prized in the formal 
gardens of his day. ' It makes,' he says, ' the 
noblest and stateliest hedges for long walks in 
the gardens or parks, of any tree whatsoever 
whose leaves are deciduous and forsake their 
branches in winter, because it grows tall and 
so sturdy as not to be wronged by the winds ; 
besides, it will furnish to the very foot of the 
stem, and flourishes with a glossy and polished 
verdure, which is exceedingly delightful, of 
long continuance, and, of all the other harder 
woods the speediest grower, maintaining a 
slender upright stem, which does not come to 
be bare and sticky in many years. It has yet 
this (shall I call it) infirmity, that, keeping on 
its leaves till new ones thrust them off, it is 
clad in russet all the winter long. That ad- 
mirable espalier hedge, in the long middle 
walk of the Luxemburgh garden at Paris, 
than which there is nothing more graceful, is 
planted of this tree ± and so is that cradle or 
close walk, with that perplext canopy which 
lately covered the seat in his Majesty's garden 
at Hampton Court. They very frequently 
plant a clump of these trees before the entries 
of the great towns in Germany, to which they 
apply timber-frames for convenience of the 
people to sit and solace in.' 
"Dr. Hunter tells us, that the hornbeam 
was in great repute at the close of the last 
century for hedges. The plants were raised 
from layers, and set in single rows in a slop- 
ing direction, so that they crossed one another 
like large network. The parts where the 
stems crossed were stripped of their bark and 
bound together with straw. By this process 
they united into a firm palisade, and throwing 
out numerous shoots, in a few years formed 
an impenetrable fence. It was not uncom- 
mon, he says, to see the sides of high roads 
thus guarded for many miles together. 
" The taste for forming ' labyrinths,' ' stars,' 
' alcoves,' and ' arcades,' happily having now 
passed away, the hornbeam is only admitted 
into gardens for the purpose of forming hedges 
to shelter tender plants, and for this its nume- 
rous branches and the property which it pog- 
