1885.] LARCH, NATIVE AND FOREIGN. 491 



were more remarkable for their daring than tlieir trustworthiness. 

 There might be one sample of greater luxuriance of growth, and 

 consequently broader and longer foliage ; but when asked whether 

 this distinction might not be the result of tlie soil and the mode of 

 cultivation, the reply of these knowing ones has always been such 

 as to confirm tlie lurking suspicion that they knew nothing what- 

 ever about the matter. The larch as we know it and grow it is in 

 fact only one species. There are, it is true, varieties, as there must 

 be in the progeny of every widely distributed tree, especially in 

 such as have come into cultivation so extensively as this valuable 

 timber tree. But I place no faith in the pretended ability of many 

 to distinguish between the seedlings raised from native saved seeds 

 and the seedlings raised from imported seeds, except they also 

 know their origin and the circumstances under which they have 

 been grown. The fact that plants from both sources, when planted 

 in the forest side by side, or even in groups apart, but in the same 

 or similar conditions of climate and soil, lose all individuality, is 

 sufficient proof of the baselessness of the pretension to be able to 

 discern between the one and the other in the seedling state. 



The only distinction. of any practical importance between seedling 

 foreign and native larch is that of individual precocity of growth in 

 spring. The former beats the latter a few days in the start or first 

 response to the increasing warmth of the season. Every one con- 

 versant with the rearing of larch in nurseries is aware of this 

 peculiarity, and have often to lament its consec^uences. A few 

 days seem but a small matter in the period of the starting of the 

 growth of an admittedly hardy tree ; but it not unfrequeutly means 

 all the difference between success and failure. Our British climate 

 is proverbially uncertain, and the v/eather of our springs is the most 

 fickle of all. From ]\Iarch till the middle or end of May, genial 

 warmth, mild showers, frost, snow, hail, and destructive east winds, 

 the one succeeding the other within the limits of twenty-four hours, 

 are the characteristics of our general spring weather. Our native 

 plants and those exotics, such as the larch, that are acclimatized 

 are constitutionally adapted to these changes. They start later 

 and move more slowly than many trees which endure in their 

 native habitats a much lower mean temperature, but which are 

 habituated to a sharper definition of the seasons. In the Tyrol and 

 the Swiss Alps, whence we procure the bulk of our imported larch 

 seed, autumn and winter are not blended together to form the 

 climate of spring as they are in the average spring of the British 

 Islands. In these continental homes of the larch, the tree, once it 

 is excited into growth, rarely receives any check, because warmth 

 increases steadily in the ratio of the advancing season. Year after 



