Among the other resources of the northern realm, which had been sorely exhausted during three centuries of war with England, Scottish woodland, once so rich and extensive, had well-nigh disappeared, and so bare was the country that when Dr. Johnson made his tour in 1773 he declared that in the whole of it he only saw three trees big enough to hang a man upon.[19] Nevertheless, after the Legislative Union in 1707, landowners very generally set about planting on their estates, none of them more diligently than James, second Duke of Atholl, who received from a neighbour returning from the Continent the present of a few seedling trees which he had brought in his portmanteau from the Tyrol. It is said that these were given to the gardener, who tried to grow them in a greenhouse. Having languished under such unsuitable conditions, the plants were thrown out upon the rubbish heap, where two of them, reviving in the free Highland air, took root and grew vigorously. The date of this incident is variously given between the years 1727 and 1738; anyhow, there the pair of "Mother Larches" stood, close to the west end of Dunkeld Cathedral, until 1909, when the larger of them was destroyed by lightning, after attaining the age of 170 years or thereby. It measured 102 feet high, with a girth of 15 feet 1 inch at 5 feet from the ground, and contained about 530 cubic feet of splendid timber. The Duke of Atholl was so well pleased with the growth and appearance of these two trees, and of three others of the same age, which, I believe, are still standing at Blair, that before his death in 1764 he had wholly altered the appearance of the landscape by planting many square miles of hillside with larch. His example was followed by other landowners, so that during the nineteenth century larch was planted in greater quantity than any other tree, except perhaps Scots pine, for it was found that, owing to the durable character of the wood even in trees from ten to twenty years old, the thinnings of a larch plantation were serviceable and readily saleable.