Chapter Traveller to Trees noted for Specific Virtues and Uses of T by Brewer's Readers Handbook

Grass will grow beneath alder, ash, cypress, elm, plane, and sycamore; but not beneath aspen, beech, chestnut, and fir.

Sea-spray does not injure sycamore or tamarisk.

Chestnut and olive never warp; larch is most apt to warp.

For posts the best woods are yew, oak, and larch; one of the worst is chestnut.

For picture-frames, maple, pear, oak, and cherry are excellent.

Fleas dislike alder, cedar, myrtle, and yew; hares and rabbits never injure lime bark; moths and spiders avoid cedar; worms never attack juniper. Beech and ash are very subject to attacks of insects. Beech is the favourite tree of dormice, acacia of nightingales.

For binding faggots, the best woods are guelder rose, hazel, osier, willow, and mountain ash.

Knives and all sorts of instruments may be sharpened on ivy roots, willow, and holly wood, as well as on a hone.

Birdlime is made from holly and the guelder rose.

Baskets are made of osier, willow, and other wicker and withy shoots; besoms, of birch, tamarisk, heath, etc.; hurdles, of hazel; barrels and tubs, of chestnut and oak; cricket-bats, of willow; fishing-rods, of ash, hazel, and blackthorn; gun-stocks, of maple and walnut; skewers, of elder and skewer wood; the teeth of rakes, of blackthorn, ash, and the twigs called withy.

The best woods for turnery are box, alder, beech, sycamore, and pear; for Tunbridge ware, lime; for wood-carving, box, lime, and poplar; for clogs, willow, alder, and beech; for oars, ash.

Beech is called the cabinet-makers’ wood; oak and elm, the ship-builders’; ash, the wheel-wrights’.

N.B.—There are several beautiful lists of trees given by poets. For example, in Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, iii., at the end, where men are sent to cut down trees for the funeral pile of Dudon. In Statius, The Thebaid, vi., where the felling of trees for the pile of the infant Archemorus is described. In Spenser, Faërie Queene, I. i. 8, 9, where the Red Cross Knight and the lady seek shelter during a storm, and much admire the forest trees.