Sargent says its growth is very rapid, the leading shoots of young trees on Puget Sound being often 3 to 4 feet long.
John Muir measured a tree in Washington 180 feet high, at 240 years old, with a trunk 4 feet 6 inches diameter. Another near Vancouver, B.C., only 48 years old, had a trunk 3 feet in diameter.
In Alaska, Gorman measured two trees—one grown in a dense wood, well protected from wind, was 160 feet high, at 267 years old, with a diameter of 3 feet 11 inches; and the other on a hillside exposed to fierce north-east gales, was 4½ feet in diameter at 14 feet from the ground, and 434 years old. The heart of this tree was 32 inches from the south-west side, and only 16½ inches from the north-east side, showing the effect of prevalent winds on the production of branches and wood.
A tree measured by Muir at Wrangel, Alaska, was no less than 764 years old, with a trunk 5 feet in diameter, and this, I think, is the greatest age to which any recorded spruce has attained.
Introduction
Though discovered in Puget Sound in May 1792 by Archibald Menzies, who was surgeon and naturalist to Vancouver's expedition, it was not introduced to cultivation until 1831 by David Douglas, and was described by Lindley under the name of Abies Menziesi one year after Bongard had made it known to science under the specific name which we adopt. It is, however, still commonly known in Great Britain as Menzies' spruce, and his name it may well bear. According to Loudon, only a very few plants were raised in the Horticultural Society's Garden in the year 1832, of which some still survive.
The Oregon Association, which was formed a little later by a few Scottish arboriculturists for the purpose of introducing the conifers of the Pacific coast, and who sent out John Jeffrey as a collector about 1850, were fortunate in procuring a large quantity of seed, from which the pineta of Scotland and England have been stocked, and it has now become a common tree.
Cultivation
Though Menzies' spruce loves a wet climate, it loves a wet soil even more, and soon becomes unsightly and loses its foliage in dry localities. No conifer, except perhaps the Douglas fir, grows so rapidly where it has a suitable situation, and in some parts of Scotland it is now being planted experimentally as a forest tree.
It is easily raised, either from home-grown or imported seed, and is, like all spruces, slow of growth for the first few years, and requires at least five or six in the nursery before it is large enough to plant out.
At Durris, in Aberdeenshire, on the property of Mr. H.R. Baird, there is a plantation of Sitka spruce about 15 acres in extent, of which Mr. John Crozier, the forester in charge of the estate, gives us the following particulars in a letter dated 12th September 1904:—
