WAYSIDE AND WOODLAND TREES.
PART I.
NATIVE TREES AND SHRUBS.
The Oak (Quercus robur).
When good John Evelyn wrote his "Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees," he was greatly concerned lest our "wooden walls" should diminish in strength for want of a succession of stout Oaks in our woodlands, and therefore he put the Oak in the forefront of his discourse. To-day steel and teak have largely supplanted oak in the building of our navy, and our walls of defence are no longer of wood. Yet in spite of these changes, and the consequent reduction of the Oak's importance, we must still look upon it as the typical British tree, and, regardless of its place in botanical classifications, we shall follow the lead of our master and place it first on our list.
There is no necessity for entering upon a minute description of the botanical characters of so well known a tree. The sturdy, massive trunk, firm as a rock; the broad, rounded outline of its head, caused by the downward sweeping extremities of the wide-spreading lower limbs; the wavy outline of the lobed leaves, and the equally distinct egg-and-cup-shaped fruit—these are characters that cannot be confused with those
of any other tree, and are the most familiar objects in the landscape in most parts of our islands. To my mind, no wood is so awe-inspiring as one filled with old oaks, all so much alike, yet each with a distinct individuality. We regard with reverence a human centenarian, who may have nothing beyond his great age to commend him to us; but we think of the long period of history of which he has been a spectator, possibly an active maker of history. The huge Oak has probably lived through ten or twenty such periods. Compared with the Oak, man is but of mushroom growth. It does not produce an acorn until sixty or seventy years old, and even then it is not mature. Not till a century and a half have passed over its head is its timber fit for use, and as a rule it is not felled under the age of two hundred years. Many trees are left to a much greater age, or we should not have still with us so many venerable specimens, and where they have not been left until partially decayed, the timber is found to be still very valuable when finally cut down. Of one of these patriarchs of the forest, cut down in the year 1810, we have figures of quantity and value from a contemporary record. It was known as the Gelenos Oak, and stood about four miles from Newport, Monmouthshire. When felled, it yielded 2426 cubic feet of sound timber, and six tons of bark. It was bought just as it stood for £405, and the purchaser had to pay £82 for labour for stripping, felling, and converting into timber. Five men were employed for twenty days in stripping the bark and felling the tree, and after that a pair of sawyers, working six days a week, were five months cutting it up. But the bark realized £200, and the timber about £400. The timber and bark from this one tree were about equal to the average produce of three acres of oak coppice after fifteen years growth.
