EIRE: Men of the Trees

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Ireland's finest silver fir still stands (thanks to the fact that a contractor's saw was once too small to fit its girth)—in Parnell's old garden at Avondale at Wicklow. But in the rest of Eire, trees are grown on only 1.6% of the land. Eire is, indeed, the most treeless country of Europe. Why? To a Dublin meeting of a dendrologists' organization called Men of the Trees, Lord Dunsany sent a caustic reason. "I never knew an Irishman," he wrote, "having access to a platform who could not make an admirable speech in favor of trees, or any having access to an ax who did not cut down all the trees within his reach."