An Environmental History of Wildlife in England 1650-1950

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(^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



  1. 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

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