Silvestral

Dealing with the subject in a very able and interesting manner Mr Pettigrew grouped the British plants in the following way:—1st, rock plants; 2nd, marsh plants; 3rd, plants that love shade; 4th, silvestral plants; 5th, riparian plants; 6th, gregarious plants and a mixed race, detailing the natural order, genus, &c., of the several groups that go to make up the British flora.

Quite a considerable number of low-level Eur-Asian species have succeeded, partly with human assistance, in rounding the great mountain-masses on the west and north-west, and established themselves as components of a flora which is derived mainly from the south and the east; while the paucity of the silvestral species indicates that the mountains have proved an effective barrier on the north to the direct passage of Eur-Asian plants.

But in the busy summer months of fields and pastures it is a farm woodlot which sees little of its owner, or, indeed, of any other two-legged silvestral traveler.

It is interesting that the "vibratum ensem" to which Merlin refers in his warning (1. 380) is in practice "cornua cervo" (1. 467), rather appropriate to his silvestral life;

He had been pleased to find further evidence of ‘tree-consciousness’ in the city of Prague itself. It was, however, at the centre of Soviet power that he found the silvestral theme really coming into its own.[…]He opens his report to this international and ecologically minded constituency by establishing that China’s interest in silvestral matters stretched far back into antiquity. Waterways and roads had been planted with elms and willows during the Sui dynasty (581–618), and mature trees were moved from distant forests ‘to grace the palaces’. Kublai Khan himself had been a man of trees, who believed, if Marco Polo is correct, that ‘those who plant trees are rewarded with long life’.