Fountains Abbey, and close to two very tall spruce. This, though hard to measure correctly owing to its crowded position, which makes a satisfactory illustration impossible, is over 80 feet high and 11 feet in girth, but is forked at about 7 feet from the ground.
The next best is at Strathfieldsaye, a very spreading tree in damp soil, also forking near the ground. The two stems measure 9 feet 6 inches and 8 feet 3 inches, and the height in 1903 was about 75 feet, the branches weeping to the ground on all sides (Plate 71). At Althorp there is a fine old specimen on the lawn, of a more upright type, which in 1903 was 63 feet by 8 feet 10 inches. At Walcot, in Shropshire, the seat of the Earl of Powis, is one of the best grown trees I have seen, with a bole about 25 feet high, and measuring 60 feet by 8 feet 8 inches. At Mr. Heelas’ residence, near Reading, part of the old White Knights estate, is a tree, probably planted 150 years ago, which Henry in 1904 found to be 67 feet by 8 feet. At Arley Castle there is a fine tree dividing into three stems, of which the largest is 6 feet 7 inches in girth and nearly 70 feet high.
At Hardwick, Bury St. Edmunds, there is a tree, forked at 30 feet up, 60 feet by 5 feet ro inches. At Beauport, Sussex, a tree measured in 1904, 65 feet by 7 feet. At Osberton, Notts, the seat of Mr. F. Savile Foljambe, there is a remarkably spreading old tree about 42 feet high, and dividing near the ground into three stems, each about 6 feet in girth. It has some layered branches which are over 20 feet high, and the total circumference is no less than 80 paces. Bunbury, Arboretum Notes, p. 140, mentions as the largest hemlock in the country one growing at Bowood, Wiltshire, the seat of the Marquess of Lansdowne, which, however, cannot now be found.
In Scotland, where the tree should succeed well, I have seen none of great size, except the tree at Dunkeld, which is growing in a thick wood of conifers mixed with beech on rocky ground, close to the Hermitage bridge. This is mentioned by Hunter as being 80 feet high by 1o feet in girth. Mr. D. Keir twenty years later made it 85 feet by 11 feet, and when he showed it to me in 1906 I found that, though the top is not easy to see, it is probably as much as 90 feet, and looks as if it would grow taller. It divides at about 12 feet into several stems, and is believed to be 140 to 150 years old.
At Dalkeith there was in 1891 a tree 42 feet high by 10 feet 6 inches in girth; and at Buchanan Castle, Stirlingshire, the seat of the Duke of Montrose, one measuring 45 feet by 6 feet 10 inches.?
In Ireland the largest known to us is one at Carton, the seat of the Duke of Leinster, which in 1903 was 45 feet by 6½ feet.
Timber
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Opinions as to the value of this wood differ a good deal, and I have no personal experience in the matter. Sargent says that it is light, soft, not strong, brittle coarse, crooked-grained, difficult to work, liable to wind-shake and splinter, and not
1 Journ. R. Hort. Soc. xiv. 520, 544 (1892).
