In good soil the English elm grows to an enormous size, remaining perfectly solid to a good old age. We remember the felling of a tree called “Piff’s Elm,” on the high-road between Cheltenham and Tewkesbury, in which the hole measured 28 feet in circumference at 4 feet from the ground, and we counted 198 rings of annual growth. Still, when grown in poor gravelly soils and in the usual hedge mode, in which they are periodically shrouded and crippled, they often begin to decay in the centre at less than twenty years of age. There are varieties of the _U. campestris_, which, as they are not of any particular importance as timber trees, need only be lightly touched upon in this place. They are as follows:— 1. _Ulmus suberosa_—Cork Elm, bark of the limbs exceedingly corky. 2. _Ulmus carpinifolia_—Hornbeam-leaved Elm, leaves strongly-veined, serratures blunt; branches nearly smooth. 3. _Ulmus stricta_—Cornish Elm, leaves smooth and shining above, doubly serrated, with obtuse teeth; branches bright-brown, smooth, erect. 4. _Ulmus glabra_—Small-leaved Elm, leaves small and smooth; branches pendulous. 2. _Ulmus montana._—The Scotch Elm, the broad-leaved elm (wych hazel) of most parts of England and Scotland, is well distinguished by its large broad leaves, hop-like fruits, large limbs diverging from a less towering trunk at an obtuse angle, branches more or less lax and pendulous, bark of the twigs dark brown, smooth and not corky; of stem when rough, not _suberose_. This tree is reputed wild, but there seems reason to think that this form, and certainly the _U. campestris_, has been introduced. One reason for this conclusion is that although the _U. montana_ produces such an enormous amount of seed, yet, in as far as we know, none of this produces young trees, or, in other words, this elm does not appear to increase sporadically. Even in cultivation it is found to be exceedingly difficult to replenish our nursery stock from seed, and hence the cost of young plants, as they have to be produced from suckers, or otherwise layered, and occasionally grown from cuttings. Evelyn says:— It seems to be so much more addicted to some places than to others, that I have frequently doubted whether it be a pure indigene or translatitious; and not only because I have hardly ever known any considerable woods of them (besides some few nurseries near Cambridge, planted, I suppose, for store), but most continually in tufts, hedge-rows, and mounds; and that Shropshire, and several other counties, have rarely any growing in many miles together.—_Sylva_, vol. i. p. 127.