account of Araucaria imbricata, which does not add anything of great importance for English arboriculturists to what I have already stated. He says that there are two types of Araucaria forest, one of which is characteristic of the rainy coast mountain range of Nahuelbuta and the west side of the Andes on the Cordillera of Pemehue; and the other, which is peculiar to the drier plateaux of the Argentine territory, on the east side of the watershed. He refers to Reiche's account of the Nahuelbuta forest in Engler's Bot. Jahrbuch, xxii. no, which gives a good account of the flora. He does not confirm the statement that the male trees are smaller in size than the female, and speaks of trees occurring in deep valleys 40-50 metres high, and 2-2½ metres in diameter at about 3 feet, but does not give any exact measurements, so that this height is probably an estimate by the eye. He says that the seeds do not ripen until May in the year after flowering, but I found them ripe in February and fit to eat in January. He gives some excellent illustrations of Araucaria forests on Nahuelbuta, one of which shows a wider and more unbroken extent than any that I saw; another shows the ability of the tree to take root and grow in the crevices of bare rock. Another shows a forest at the foot of the great volcanic peak of Lanin, where some of the trees have been almost buried by sand and still retain their upright position. Lastly, he gives a small map of the distribution which, however, is not sufficiently detailed to be very accurate; this makes Antuco the most northerly point, and a point somewhere north of lat. 40°, the southerly range of the tree. He says that in the museum of Santiago there are geological evidences of the existence at a former period of Araucaria as far north as the Puna of Atacama.
Remarkable Trees
The finest tree which until recently existed in England was at Dropmore, which, however, began to die about four years ago, and was dead when the photograph (Plate 19) was taken in June 1903. It is said[1] to have been purchased at a sale in the Royal Horticultural Gardens at Chiswick in 1829, and in 1893 to have been 69 feet high. When felled in 1905 Mr. Page found it to be 78 feet 6 inches high, and the butt was 27½ inches in diameter at the base under the bark, which was about 2 inches thick, the measurable timber in it being about 65 cubic feet.
There are many fine specimens at Beauport, Sussex, the seat of Sir Archibald Lamb, Bart., where a plantation was made about forty years ago, which gives a better idea of the Araucaria at home than any I have seen in England. It contains 27 trees on an area 102 paces round, and the inside trees are clearing themselves from branches naturally. Twenty of them Sir A. Lamb says are over 50 feet high, and in 1905 I estimated them to contain an average of 25 cubic feet (Plate 20). The largest tree at Beauport, as measured by Henry in 1904, was 74 feet high and 7 feet 9 inches in girth. The trees produce seeds freely, and a seedling growing in a chink of the garden steps was 4 feet high in 1903, and in 1905 had grown at least 2 feet more.
At Strathfieldsaye, Berks, the seat of the Duke of Wellington, the Araucaria has produced self-sown seedlings, a group of which is shown in Plate 15 e.
- ↑ Gard. Chron. 1893, i. 232; also l.c. 1872, p. 1324.
