Page:TheTreesOfGreatBritainAndIreland vol01.djvu/96

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68
The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland

teristic sharp angles made by the smaller erect branches with the larger horizontal limbs.

Another photograph sent me by Mr. Ashe shows a group of Liriodendron, in the forests of Transylvania Co., N.C., 120–140 feet high and 45 feet in diameter, associated with Quercus rubra and Betula lutea which are not so tall. This magnificent forest is, like most of those accessible to the lumbermen, rapidly decreasing in area and beauty, owing to the growing demand for timber.

For further details of the distribution in North Carolina refer to Pinchot and Ashe's admirable account, pp. 39–41, and to a paper by Overton Price on "Practical Forestry in the Southern Appalachians."[1]

The largest trees of this species, however, have been recorded by Professor R. Ridgway[2] from Southern Indiana and Illinois, near Mount Carmel, Illinois, which I had the pleasure of visiting under the guidance of Dr. J. Schneck in September 1904. Though the largest trees recorded by him have now been cut, reliable measurements were taken of a tulip tree which reached the astonishing height of 190 feet, exceeding that of any non-coniferous tree recorded in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. Another tree cut "8 miles east of Vincennes, was 8 feet across the top of the stump, which was solid to the centre; the last cut was 63 feet from the first, and the trunk made 80,000 shingles." The soil here is an exceedingly rich, deep alluvium, and the climate in summer very hot and moist.

It is stated in Garden and Forest, 1897, p. 458, that at the Nashville Exhibition a log of this tree was shown by the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railroad Company, which measured 42 feet long, 10 feet 4 inches in diameter at the butt, and 7 feet at the smaller end, containing 1260 cubic feet of timber, and about 600 years old.

Introduction

The tulip tree was probably introduced, according to Evelyn,[3] by John Tradescant about the middle of the seventeenth century, but this is somewhat uncertain, though it was grown by Bishop Compton at Fulham in 1688.

According to Hunter the tree which first flowered in England was in the gardens of the Earl of Peterborough at Parsons Green, Fulham, and this he describes in 1776 as "an old tree quite destroyed by others which overhang it." At that time there were also some trees of great bulk at Wilton, the seat of the Earl of Pembroke in Wilts.

Cultivation

Though the tree can be propagated by means of layers, and in the case of varieties by grafting, yet as seeds are easily procured from the United States it is much better to raise it from seed. Cobbett, who was a great admirer of the tulip tree, gives a long account of it, and of the best means of raising it,[4] and says that if sown in May, which he thinks the best time, it will germinate in the following May,

  1. Yearbook U.S. Dept. of Agric. (1900).
  2. Notes on Trees of Lower Wabash, Proc. U.S. Nat. Hist. Mus. 1882, p. 49; 1894, p. 411.
  3. Evelyn's Silva, 214. Ed. Hunter (1776).
  4. Woodlands, par. 523 (1823).