(^12) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
Oxford meadows, should have remained unnoticed by the various botanists
who resided in or visited Oxford’.^46 Although there are some possible early
references to the plant in the wild, the first unequivocal one comes as late as
- Native to Europe, it may again have been introduced as a garden plant,
later escaping into the wider countryside. Ornamental (and medicinal) gardens
have certainly existed in England since at least Roman times and many of
the foreign plants which were established within them have unquestionably
escaped into the wider countryside. Examples include both relatively
uncommon species such as clove pink (Dianthus caryophyllus), Jacob’s ladder
(Polemonium caeruleum) and globe thistle (Echinops sphaerocephalus),
and also more familiar ones like Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum) and
opium poppy (Papaver somnifernum), both of which like ground elder – the
gardener’s bane – were probably introduced by the Romans.^47 As we shall see,
gardens were to continue to function as important conduits for alien plant
species throughout the period covered by this book.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, there had also been a number of
important tree introductions. The sweet chestnut, a native of southern Europe,
arrived in the Roman period, and a number of magnificent, ‘veteran’ examples
now exist – most notably the great Tortworth chestnut in Gloucestershire,
which even in 1800 was thought to be over 600 years old.^48 More problematic
is the sycamore. Until recently it was accepted that this had been brought to
England in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries from continental Europe. Its
pollen was unrecognized in early cores, and John Gerard in 1597 described
the ‘Great Maple’ as ‘a stranger in England’.^49 However, sycamore leaves are
unmistakably carved (together with those of maple, with which they might
be confused) on the thirteenth-century tomb of St Frideswide in Oxford, and
some arboriculturalists have recently argued that sycamore is native to western
Britain, where some particularly old specimens exist.^50 But no examples of its
distinctive wood have ever been found preserved in archaeological deposits,
and the Anglo-Saxons do not seem to have had a word for it. The tree was
almost certainly a medieval introduction, of an ornamental character: Evelyn
in 1664 refers to its use in ‘Gardens and Avenues’.^51 It has since become
widely established in the countryside, in part through deliberate planting,
in part dispersing under its own steam. Tree introductions continued on an
increasing scale in the post-medieval period. The horse chestnut arrived from
the Balkans around 1600: the Cedar of Lebanon probably in the 1620s, along
with the silver fir, the European larch, false acacia and the American plane.^52
Most of these were to remain in gardens and parks although the larch was to
be extensively planted in the wider landscape in the course of the eighteenth,
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Once again, there were to be further
introductions in the course of the subsequent centuries.
A surprising number of our common mammals are also introductions.
The house mouse was an early arrival, probably in later prehistory, a
beneficiary of settled agriculturalism.^53 The black rat came later. A native
of southern India, it appears to have spread along trade routes, into the