REFERENCE TO THE HORNBEAMS IN EPPING FOREST. 93
up, as in the "shock-head" forms familiar to us along our river
banks. Though not commonly pollarded in this country, poplars
are so occasionally on the Continent, and are so commonly, under the
name of cottonwood, as fuel, in the United States. The hornbeam
has been so uniformly pollarded in England, as hardly ever to be
seen as a spear tree. It is a timber tree, and derives its name from
its horny wood, which was used in the manufacture of yokes and
cog-wheels ; but it furnishes so excellent a fuel that it has been
regarded almost exclusively as firewood.
If, on the other hand, we go into a plantation of pines, firs,
spruces, or larches, we find no such coppice growth; for, with the
exception of the Redwood of California (Sequoia sempervirens), the
Coniferae do not produce "adventitious" shoots or buds, as these
shoots are termed by botanists.
It is rather remarkable that in most of our modern botanical text-
books, which we borrow so generally from the Germans, there is
hardly any mention of pollards or coppice as illustrative of adven-
titious budding. When the authors of these works dwell on the
comparative rarity of adventitious buds they may perhaps only mean
to imply their rarity on natural uninjured structures, since they are
surely common enough on cut or injured surfaces, from the well-
known case of the leaves of Begonia to the pollards we are now
considering. In calling these shoots, or the buds in which they
originate, "adventitious," we merely imply that they arise in no
definite order.
Pollarding, and, to limit the subject of our consideration, the
pollarding of the hornbeam, is no doubt a practice of considerable
antiquity. Having traced this species through the wildest woodlands
of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Middlesex, and Essex, I have little hesitation
in terming it one of the most characteristically indigenous trees of
south-east England. At the same time it must, I fear, be admitted
that, until our own time, our woodlands have been regarded, both
by commoners and by lords of the manors, solely as sources of
profit, on the one side as firewood, on the other as cover for game
or as timber. No considerations of scientific treatment or of beauty
have prevailed, though some people seem even now to prefer the
grotesque distortions of disease to the symmetry of healthy develop-
ment.
In normal growth the hornbeam somewhat resembles the beech,
its lower boughs occasionally sweeping down to the ground, and it is