Book contents
- Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
- Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology of Works Referenced
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Shifting Ecologies
- Chapter 3 Toxic Ecologies, Ecogothic and Violence against the Land
- Chapter 4 Wild Places, Rarity and Extinction
- Chapter 5 Trees
- Chapter 6 Stone, Water, Air
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
Chapter 5 - Trees
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2021
- Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
- Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology of Works Referenced
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Shifting Ecologies
- Chapter 3 Toxic Ecologies, Ecogothic and Violence against the Land
- Chapter 4 Wild Places, Rarity and Extinction
- Chapter 5 Trees
- Chapter 6 Stone, Water, Air
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
Summary
Scott’s lifelong passion for trees is the subject of this chapter. Trees in Scotland’s folklore and mythology, as individual living species, and collectively in the environments that once were the nation’s great forests, are shown to be of paramount importance to his literary and personal writing. Articles for the Quarterly Review and other periodicals, letters to correspondents, including poet Joanna Baillie, and his unpublished personal planting journal Sylva Abbotsfordiensis are explored for their record of Scott’s nationally acknowledged expertise in silviculture, his planting programmes at Abbotsford and his experiments with growing conditions. Using a deep-time framework and recent scientific discovery, the chapter looks back to the first tree species to colonize Scotland after the last great glaciation. Scott’s planting of native species and advocacy of their value to the nation is revealed as a form of environmental reconstitution. Tensions between the aesthetics of planting and agrarian economics are investigated.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Walter Scott and the Greening of ScotlandEmergent Ecologies of a Nation, pp. 113 - 139Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021