Page:TheTreesOfGreatBritainAndIreland vol01.djvu/19



The United Kingdom offers a hospitality to exotic vegetation which finds no parallel in the Northern Temperate region of the globe. Never parched by the heat of a continental summer, the rigour of winter is no less tempered by its insular position. The possession of land still ensures the residence on their properties of a large number of persons of at least moderate affluence. The most modest country house possesses a garden, and not rarely some sort of pleasure ground; and this usually reaches the dimensions of a park in the case of the larger mansions. While forests for the commercial production of timber such as are found in foreign countries hardly exist, and the methods of their scientific management are little recognised, arboriculture of some sort may be almost said to be a national passion. In all but purely agricultural districts the free and unrestrained growth of trees enhances, if it does not create, the natural beauty of the landscape. The Roman occupation brought to our shores our fruit-trees and others whose names of Latin derivation bear witness to their foreign origin. One of these, the so-called "English Elm," dominates the landscape of Southern England. Yet, while it perfects its seed on the Continent, it rarely does so in this country, and it holds its own by root suckers, the tenacity of which is all but ineradicable.

Down to the reign of Henry the Eighth the native forests supplied the timber necessary for construction. It was not till their area became restricted that planting was commenced to maintain the supply. And if this has never developed into a scientific system as it has done abroad, the reason may be found in the abandonment of wood as fuel for coal, and the facilities for external supply of over-sea water-carriage which attach to a maritime country.

From an early time with the growth of continental intercourse, the contents of foreign gardens had gradually been transferred to those of the wealthy at home. The taste, however, for cultivating foreign trees and shrubs simply for their interest, and apart from any useful purpose they might serve, is not more recent than the seventeenth century. The pioneer in this branch of English arboriculture was Henry Compton, Bishop of London, who planted in the garden of Fulham Palace "a greater variety of curious exotic plants and trees than had at that time been collected in any garden in England." Hitherto the European continent had