Cultivation
Although there is no record of its introduction to Britain, the tree probably arrived with the Romans, a hypothesis supported by the discovery of pollen in an excavated Roman vineyard. It is possible the tree was used also as a source of leaf hay. The introduction of the tree to Spain from Italy is recorded by the Roman agronomist Columella. It has also been identified as the elm grown in the vineyards of the Valais, or Wallis, canton of Switzerland.
More than a thousand years after the departure of the Romans from Britain, the English Elm found far greater popularity, as the preferred tree for planting in the new Hawthorn hedgerows appearing as a consequence of the Enclosure movement, which lasted from 1550 to 1850. In parts of the Severn Valley, the tree occurred at densities of over 1000 per square kilometre, so prolific as to have been known as the 'Worcester Weed'
Read more about this topic: Ulmus Procera
Famous quotes containing the word cultivation:
“We Russians have assigned ourselves no other task in life but the cultivation of our own personalities, and when we’re barely past childhood, we set to work to cultivate them, those unfortunate personalities.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)
“Let these memorials of built stone music’s
enduring instrument, of many centuries of
patient cultivation of the earth, of English
verse ...”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)