CENTURIES OLD.

Cromwell Argus, Volume L, Issue 2644, 13 October 1919, Page 7

CENTURIES OLD.

If trees, which are now being felled in wholesale fashion, could speak, what stories certain of them could tell. An ancient oak in the beautiful garden of the Dowager Countess of Derby would have at least one incident of world-wide interest to record. IBy its side is a stone seat bearing ! a tablet recording that Wilburforce I wrote in his diary in 1783 that he | well remembered, after a conversa- | tion with Pitt and before descending | into the Vale of Keston, sitting at j the foot of “an old tree” and reslovI ing to give notice in the House of Commons that he would move the abolition of the Slave Trade. If this tree was described as “old” a hundred and thirty years ago, it must be venerable indeed to-day. There is a famous chestnut in Gloucestershire which has watched the vicissitudes of life in England since Stephen’s reign, 1150, and there are others at Dorking, Surrey, which were planted in 1377. The celebrated chestnut of Aetna could tell stories of a thousand years ago, while certain of the olive trees on the Mount of Olives are supposed to have been there before Christ was born. On the slopes of the Sierra Nevadas, in Spain, there, are to be found, 5,000 ft. above sea-level, cone-bearing trees 10ft. to 20ft, in diameter. These trees are judged to grotv about ten inches in diameter in twenty years, and so to be over 3,000 years old. This is not a record, however. The Dragon Tree in TencrifTe is 2,000 years older.