neW roles for naTure^129of Special Scientific Interest, such as that at Eridge Park on the Kent/Sussex
border. Parks also usually contained much old timber. Earlier hedgerow
trees were almost always retained when parks were laid out, most of them
pollards which ceased to be cropped as soon as they became features of
these ornamental landscapes.^86 This practice provided an instant parkland
appearance, while ancient specimens around a mansion hinted, often
spuriously, at a family’s longevity in a particular location. An affection
for old trees was, however, something more widely shared at the time.
Contemporaries describe a countryside filled with ancient, named trees,
a source of pride to local people. James Grigor typically described in the
1830s how the oak called ‘King of Thorpe’ in Norfolk had ‘become to the
villagers an object of veneration and awe: their children know it, and run
eagerly and proudly to show it to us’.^87 The Sherwood Forest oaks, the
Boscobel Oak in Shropshire (where Charles II had allegedly found refuge),
the great oak at Winfarthing in south Norfolk, were all firmly on the tourist
trail. But however widely shared an affection for old trees might have been
the sheer scale of the demand for wood and timber ensured that practical
considerations generally took precedence over aesthetic and romantic ones.
Standards were generally felled before they were a century old; pollards
would be cut up for firewood once their productivity declined in senescence.
It was thus usually only the wealthy who could afford to preserve ancient trees
from the woodman’s axe, propping up particular specimens with wooden
poles, or binding their splitting trunks with iron. Eighteenth-century estate
maps often show examples close to country houses, such as the ‘Queen Oak’
in Brocket Park in Hertfordshire, depicted (with a seat around it) on a map
of 1798.^88 At nearby Panshanger in 1757 a visitor to the home of Spencer
Cowper described how ‘The finest oak in all this country is in his woods
- 5 yards & a half round, & not the least decayed – he has made a grand
Walk thro the coppice to it’.^89 The strong association of the oldest trees, so
important as we have seen for biodiversity (above, p. 24), and the parks and
gardens of the wealthy, is still apparent today. In Norfolk, for example, it
has been calculated that over half the oaks existing today with girths of six
metres or more are found in such locations.^90
As well as retaining trees from the earlier agricultural landscape, Brown
and his contemporaries also planted vast numbers of new ones, in belts and
clumps, and as free-standing specimens. Most were indigenous hardwoods,
mainly oaks and elms, with some ash and beech and the occasional lime
and sweet chestnut. But conifers, especially cedar of Lebanon, Scots pine
and larch, were more prominent than we usually think: because of their
shorter lifespan, these have not usually survived to the present, ensuring the
dominance of their longer-lived indigenous companions.
Parks continued to be the main setting for great mansions and smaller
villas alike into the nineteenth century, but gardens then began to return to
prominence, grew increasingly formal and geometric in design, and were
once again placed below the main facades of the mansion. Under mid-century