Laudator Temporis Acti

Richard Mabey, Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees (2007; rpt. London: Vintage Books, 2008), pp. 195-198 (on the Forest of Fontainebleau):

But the Forest was already beginning to become the haunt of the Parisian artistic and middle classes, and a literate opposition to the 'industrialisation' of the forest began. A survey in 1852 revealed that some 70 per cent of the Forest was being used for 'industry', which meant any system of organised management. The eminent artist Théodore Rousseau, who had been painting the Forest since the 1830s, rallied his friends, and petitioned Napoleon III to protect the forêt ancienne from the debilitating cankers of commercial forestry and the tourist industry.

....

The local artists' view of the Forest hardly coincided with the manicured tourist honeypot they'd unwittingly encouraged it to become, and one writer, Emile Bernard, complained that it was acquiring the 'cultivated air of an English landscape garden'. But for the French government, the simultaneous rise of Fontainebleau as a commercial gold-mine and a centre of French artistic excellence couldn't have been handier, and Napoleon III readily agreed to Rousseau's 1851 petition. In an unprecedented move, he authorised the creation in 1853 of some 400 hectares of Réserves artistiques, groups of especially beguiling old trees and rocks, which were to remain uncut and unmanaged. It was the first nature reserve ever to be established for aesthetic reasons, and the first reserve of any kind in western Europe. (Czechoslovakia had been creating forest reserves like Boubinsky Prales since the 1830s.) The reserved area was expanded to 1,000 hectares in 1861, and then into a full-scale Série Artistique covering one-tenth of the Forest (4,000 hectares) by 1904.

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Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 116:

In 1873 the painter Edmund Kanoldt discovered, to his horror, that the ancient oakwood of La Serpentara at Olevano, east of Rome, was doomed to be felled. Ever since it had been discovered by Joseph Anton Koch, the grove had been virtually annexed by generations of German painters in Rome, as their forest home-away-from-home. Kanoldt himself had sketched and painted there, and such was his indignation at its fate that he recruited the German ambassador in Rome for its preservation. With the heavy guns of officialdom weighing in, enough money was raised to buy the wood outright and it was presented to the kaiser, who established it in perpetuity as the “Estate of German Artists.” In appreciation for the patronage, a Kaiser-Eiche was planted at La Serpentara to mark Wilhelm I’s ninetieth birthday. To this day the property remains the summer resort of the German Academy in Rome. Though barely ninety oak trees survive, they still constitute a little outcrop of the German woods, in the very heart of the Latin state.

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Donald Culross Peattie, The Road of a Naturalist (1941; rpt. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986), p. 264:

That was when my mother wrote to me from Tryon in Carolina that the glen I loved there, with tall trees and a waterfall in it, was to be sold up for its lumber, and what had I to say to that? So I sat down, in our Riviera villa, and wrote about everything that grew there, the tulip trees and sourwood and dogwood, the maidenhair and trillium and trembling saxifrage, and the birds and mammals and insects, and about the falls itself, that leaps forever with a pulsation like living. This report my mother's friends took to the richest man in the small town, and he bought the glen for them. The women have paid him back. The trees are there still, and the dewed maidenhair; the red birds call 'What cheer!' there, and any time I like I can listen and hear the pulsation of the falling water.

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Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867),
L'Automne au Jean-du-Paris,
Forêt de Fontainebleau
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