Tree Oddities Ashridge has many beauties (as well as some
architectural oddities) and perhaps the greatest are the trees. One botanist who joined a course there found a number of curiosities. What most struck him was a contrast in the limes. The famous lime avenue consists of tall, almost narrow, trees, nursed to such a shape and height by the closeness 6f the planting. Elsewhere, in a rather obscure resort, are a few limes that have been left to their own devices. The lower branches have spread out to 20 feet or so, sunk to the ground by their weight and then taken root so that each tree is surrounded by a fairy ring of young limes. This habit is not rare in some species of tree, and it is normal, for example, with bush-like hollies, but it is new to me in the lime. Other unusual habits have been noted in some of the arbutus trees nearby, which, so to say, have been born again from their old rotted trunks.
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