This article examines the transformation of woodland management on the Buccleuch estates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, looking over the longue durée to highlight how trees and forestry practices reflected wider developments in Scottish society. Focusing on the estates at Dalkeith and Drumlanrig, it explores the competing priorities of aesthetics, access, and commercial value that shaped arboricultural decision-making. From aristocratic landscape design and Enlightenment-era ideals of improvement to concerns for national self-sufficiency in timber and developing global economic pressures, trees on the Buccleuch estate manifested a range of competing imperatives. The article reveals how the contradictions of commercial modernity were etched onto the landscape by woodlands, as trees provided a visible manifestation of the tensions between nature and artifice, stability and transformation, self-sufficiency and trade, beauty and utility, access and exclusion. Large landowners like Buccleuch were leading actors in the transfer and dissemination of arboricultural knowledge; the creation of a visual language of picturesque and ornamental beauty centred around trees; and in developing both commercially minded management strategies and governmental approaches to securing long term timber production.
Andrew Phemister (Fri,) studied this question.