Sir Walter Scott's Transatlantic Ecology

Abstract

How did Sir Waller Scott engage with human migration and the timber trade between Scotland and the British Crown Canadian Colonies in the early 19th century? This question points to interrelations between Scott's writing, the Highland clearances, growth in the transatlantic lumber industry, and the export to Britain of live trees (seeds and saplings) from the Provinces of Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Scott was, and remains, known for his representations of changing Scottish landscapes in the Highlands and Islands, the margins between the Highlands and Lowlands, and the Borders region. In those landscapes, developments in sheep husbandry, commercially motivated forestation of areas classified as or wilderness, and policies of coerced or enforced migration of small farmers and land workers were altering the economic structure and ecology of Scotland. As a Romantic writer, Scott regarded aesthetic experience and sympathy as ways of understanding the altered demographies and biospheres of his home nation. He was equally committed to an empirical, experimental approach to trees on his own Abbotsford estate at Melrose in Roxburgshire. Scott's reputation and the esteem for his expertise in arboriculture led to his being one of four specialists commissioned by the Highland Society in 1823 to report on practices of propagating and transplanting trees at Henry Steuart's Allanton estate in Lanarkshire, north of Glasgow. The report of those four aimed to identify a strategy for the forestation of new areas in Scotland, particularly on what was regarded as marginal land. Scott recalled live years later in his review of Steuart's The Planter's Guide: or, a Practical Essay on the Best Method of Giving Immediate Effect to Wood by the Removal of Large Trees and Underwood for the Quarterly Review March, 1828, that the soil on Steuart's land was moorish, with the no striking features of grandeur of (323). His denial of aesthetic features appears to forestall emotional reaction, directing attention to the matter in hand: that is, to the science of cultivating trees. However, aesthetic experience is only suspended because, in a short time and after careful transplantation, young trees from a sample group add picturesque or sublime qualities such as of form and vigour (324) to Steuart's estate. By implication, nursery growth and transplantation has the potential to transform other areas of Scotland. Ecological factors are crucial agents in the postponement of affect: for the consistency of the soil on the Allanton estate--similar to that of moorland--allows the trees to flourish in harsh conditions. A second sample group of trees included mixed native species and imported Canadian Birdcherry, showing experiments with tree varieties that grew in different soils (324). From the start of his writing career, Scott's representation of relationships between people and trees is informed by Scottish Enlightenment theories about science and human history, and by developments in Germany including Johann Gottfried Herder's Outlives of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1791). Herder argued that human beings exist within a natural system or geographical aerology in which they and other living things in any region respond to the nature of the quality of the land, air, water and other regional factors, all of which contribute to a diverse universe of interrelated environments in which variety is beauty (24, 25,149). the MLA panel where this paper was first delivered and in this issue of TWC, James McKusick identified an early ecosystem approach to natural boundaries in Scott's work on forestry, and specifically in the 1827 essay for the Quarterly Review that carried the running header On waste lands. As McKusick notes, Scott takes a biocentric perspective in his planting essay that responds to an earlier sylvicultural treatise by John Evelyn, and that assents to the interdependence of all living things within a complex, dynamic system. …