The beech-tree was not so great a
favourite as the elm. In the valleys where
they stand warm and in consort, they will,
he says, grow to a stupendous procerity
(height), though the soil be stony and
very barren; also upon the declivity, sides,
and tops of high hills, and chalky
mountains especially, for though they thrust not
down such deep and numerous roots as the
oak, and grow to vast trees, they will
strangely insinuate their roots into the
bowels of those seemingly impenetrable
places. The beech serves for various uses
of the housewife:

   Beech makes the chest, the bed, and the joint stools,
   Beech makes the boards, the platter and the bowls.

But with these and other such exceptions,
Evelyn condemned the beech as timber.
"Indeed," he says, "I can hardly call it
timber." He nevertheless considered it in
every respect a highly respectable and
useful tree. "I must not omit," he says,
"to praise the mast (the nuts) which fats
our swine and deer, and hath in some
families even supported man with bread.
Chios endured a memorable siege by the
benefit of beech-mast, and in some parts of
France they now grind it in mills. It
affords a sweet oil, which the people eat
willingly. But there is yet another benefit
which this tree presents us, that its very
leaves, which make a most agreeable canopy
all the summer, being gathered about the
fall,* and somewhat before they are much
frost-bitten, afford the best and easiest
mattresses in the world to lie on under our
quilts, instead of straw, because, besides
their tenderness and loose-lying together,
they continue sweet for seven or eight
years, long before which time straw becomes
musty and hard. They are thus used by
divers persons of quality, in Dauphiny;
and in Switzerland I have sometimes lain
on them to my great refreshment. . . . The
kernels of the mast are greedily devoured
by squirrels, mice, and, above all, by
dormice, who, harbouring in the hollow trees,
grow so fat, that in some countries abroad
they take infinite numbers of them, I
suppose to eat. What relief they give to
thrushes, blackbirds, and fieldfares everybody
knows."
* The Americans claim this word as their own, a
claim which cannot be allowed. It is good old English,
and far better than the modern "autumn."

Evelyn had no taste for philology, or he
might have recorded that the practice of
our Anglo-Saxon ancestors of writing on
the bark of the "buch," or "buck" (the
beech-tree), gave the English language
the word "book." The many picturesque
clumps and clusters of beeches in various
parts of England are well-known, and few
Londoners are unacquainted either with
the Burnham beeches, near Windsor, or
the Knockholt beeches, in Kent.

Evelyn, though he loved all trees for
some quality or other, had but little good
to say of the "birch," which he stigmatised,
chiefly for its timber, as despicable,
or for the elder, which he considered to be
both "despicable and vulgar." The ash—of
which the old song, a favourite of Charles
the Second's, says:

    Oh, the oak and the ash, and the bonnie ivy-tree,
    They flourish at home in my own country—

stood high in Evelyn's estimation.

"The husbandman," he says, "cannot be
without the ash for his carts, ladders, and
other tackling, from the pike to the plough,
spear and bow, for of ash were they formerly
made, and therefore reckoned amongst those
woods which, after a long tension, has a
natural spring and recovers its position; so
that in peace or war it is a wood in highest
request. In short, so useful and profitable
is this tree (next to the oak), that every
prudent lord of a manor should employ an
acre of ground into ash or acorns, to every
twenty acres of other land, since in as
many years it would be worth more than
the land itself." He also finds as many
medicinal virtues in the ash as in the oak.
"There is," he says, "an oil extracted from
the ash, which is excellent to recover the
hearing, some drops of it being distilled
warm into the ears. For the caries, or rot
of the bones, for toothache, pains in the
kidneys, and for the spleen, the anointing
therewith is most sovereign."

The lime, or linden tree, which is now a
greater favourite in England than it was
in Evelyn's time, and which, in the poetry
and romance of the Germans, ranks above
all other trees whatever, received Evelyn's
hearty commendation. "We send commonly
for this tree into Flanders and Holland, and
it is a shameful negligence that we are no
better provided with nurseries of a tree so
choice and so universally acceptable. Limes
may be planted as big as one's leg; their
heads topped at about six or eight feet
bole; they will thus become of all others
the most proper and beautiful for walks,
as producing an upright body, smooth and
even bark, ample leaf, sweet blossom (the
delight of bees), and a goodly shade."
Recalling to mind his travels in Holland and