This is Strutt's plate of the Crawley Elm, which, he says, grows in the middle of the village, providing “an inexhaustible source of pleasure to the train of village children who cluster like bees around it; trying their infant strength and courage in climbing its mimic precipices, while their parents recall, in their pastimes, the feelings of their own childhood; when, like them, they disported under the same boughs.”

A less rose-tinted view of the Crawley Elm was provided in another book on trees, Henry Phillips’ Sylva Florifera, published in 1823.  He says that a poor woman once gave birth in this tree, and lived there for a long time, but that it is now kept locked up to prevent such infants becoming a burden on the local poor-rates:

… as the parish is not willing to be burthened with all the young elms which might have been brought forth from the trunk of this singular tree, the lord of the manor has very wisely put up a door at the entrance of this lying-in hospital, and which is kept locked, except upon particular occasions, when the neighbours meet to enjoy their pipe, and tell old tales in the cavity of this elm, that  is capable of containing a party of more than a dozen.

Strutt makes no mention of the locked door or the story of the poor woman giving birth, details which rather undermine the impression of bucolic harmony and happiness given by his more or less contemporary account of the Crawley Elm. 

I'm fascinated by all these 18th and 19th-century accounts of people having parties inside hollow trees. Here is Gilbert Burnett, writing in the folio edition of Burgess's Eidodendron about an occasion in the King’s Oak in Windsor Forest:  

We lunched in it September 22nd, 1829: it would accommodate at least twenty persons with standing room, and ten or a dozen might sit down comfortably to dinner. I think at Willis’s and in Guildhall I have danced a quadrille on a smaller space.


I imagine all these gents in their smart clothes and I wonder: didn't they get dirty? wasn't it dark and claustrophobic inside the tree? 


I have yet to visit a tree that felt at all like a possible venue for lunch or dinner, but perhaps I will feel differently when I have seen the Bowthorpe oak.

I've also been to visit the Ankerwyke, or Ankerwycke Yew. This tree is included in Strutt's Sylva Britannica, and also in another set of fine prints of trees - Henry William Burgess's Eidodendron (published in a folio edition in 1829).

Here are the Strutt and Burgess images side by side. You'd hardly think they were the same tree, would you? The explanation, I think, is that (a) Burgess took a rather more romantic, less scientific approach to his trees than Strutt, and (b) that when Strutt drew the tree, it had been trimmed - a relic of the fashion for topiary which was dying out by this time. When Burgess drew it several years later, the estate had changed hands and the new owner was letting the tree spread out its foliage freely. But both artists show it in a parkland setting, with open space around it. Its situation today is very different: the area is very overgrown and it's not possible to stand back and photograph the tree as a whole. But the trunk of the tree looks quite like Strutt's rendition of it.

This tree has recently become very famous because of the theory that it was the site of the signing of Magna Carta. A fallen branch beside the tree had received "offerings" of fresh flowers when I visited. Our modern attitude to these "venerable" ancient trees has much in common with the attitudes that caused Strutt and Burgess to produce their large, finely drawn "portraits." They were associated then, as now, with the continuities in British history and a sense of the tree as sacred.

I've been looking at a a beautiful book: Jacob George Strutt's Sylva Britannica (1826). This consists of portraits of remarkable trees, with a fascinating text. It is large - folio size. I don't understand why there has (apparently) been very little research done on Strutt. Apart from an excellent thesis by Beryl Hartley, I can't find any modern articles on him. This is his etching of the Tortworth Chestnut - a tree in Gloucestershire that is probably over a thousand years old.

I went to see this tree a couple of weeks ago - obviously it has changed a bit in nearly 200 years - but I think Strutt has captured its character remarkably well.