WONDERFUL TREE

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 March 1926, Page 5

WONDERFUL TREE

FED BY A A romantic story has come to light in an Oxford garden. Up to 1899 two of the largest trees in England were said to be an oak somewhere in Yorkshire and a titanic elm in a garden in Magdalen Grove, Oxford. In that year the elm was blown down in a gale, but its glories live in memory and have been revived afresh in the light of a new discovery. The fact is that in order to lay gravel on the paths of the kitchen garden at Magdalen College, a gravel pit -hard by has been worked, and many bones of'men, of cattle, of deer, and of mammoths have come to light. Some have been strewn in fragments on the paths, priceless history trodden underfoot. •

Now, where the old elm grew, giant neckbones of a mammoth have been unearthed, and the secret of the elm’s prodigious size explained. The mammoth ate of the trees of ancient Britain, died, and became a fossilised remainder of bones. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of years later'this elm tree arose on the mammoth’s tomb and fed upon its buried skeleton. Bones are rich in phosphates, which are food for vegetation. The roots of the tree found the mammoth and reclaimed the nourishment which the animal had in turn derived from, the sun-fed vegetation of prehistoric days and, so nurtured, the Magdalen elm reached a height of 310 ft. Many an Oxford student must have conned his Shakespeare beneath that old elm, and been reminded that “Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away,” without dreaming what a romantic transformation ‘of matter the prosperity of the giant tree represented.