-Ailanthiculture. 193 
owing to the early spring, they appeared the last week in April : 
they fall at the end of October. If the tree is kept stooled so as 
to provide a luxuriant foliage, the buds break earlier than in the 
large trees, and the leaves may be retained to the 10th of Novem- 
ber, or even for a fortnight later in a warm, sheltered nook. The 
growth of the tree is most luxuriant; from seven to ten feet is no 
unusual length of shoot in a single summer in good soil, when 
the tree is young or has been stooled. A correspondent from 
Suffolk mentions ten and even twelve feet as the growth of a 
single shoot in 1865, besides another shoot of seven feet from the 
same tree—four years old; and in Devonshire eight feet is no 
unusual growth, The circumference of such shoots would be from 
two to three inches. The height of a seedling one year old 
averages from* nine to eighteen inches, the second year from 
three to five feet. The tap roots are long and strong; in one 
seedling, four inches above the soil, the tap root was four feet long. 
In rapid growth it exceeds even the Italian poplar. It is not 
uncommon in France to see copses of five or six years cld of the 
same size and having as much wood fit for firewood as an oak 
plantation of eighteen to twenty years old; admitting, therefore, 
of a fall every ten years, and in favourable conditions of soil, &c., 
every eight years.* 
Repeated measurings give an annual increase averaging about 
an inch and a half in the circumference of the tree. ‘The leaf- 
stalks are of great length ; some I have measured were three feet 
and a half to four feet long, pendant with a graceful curve at the 
Jower third of their length ; the leaflets are large, some measuring 
eight and half inches in length by three in breadth, from thirteen 
to seventeen on a leaf-stalk : near the base of the leaf the margin is 
toothed, and at the extremity of the tooth is a little gland, emitting 
a strong resinous odour, whence the name glandulosa ; of these 
teeth and glands there are generally two, three, or more on each 
leaflet. The same odour seems to be communicated more or less 
to the leaf, also to the larva, and in a less degree to the imago of 
Bombyx Cynthia. 
The flowers are both male and female and some hermaphrodite, 
they appear at the end of July, exhale a strong scent, and are 
of a greenish-yellow colour, fasciculate, and arranged in a 
terminal panicle; the calyx and corolla are in five divisions; the 
stamens are 10 in the male, 2 or 3 in the hermaphrodite flowers ; 
the carpels are from 3 to 5.. The seed-pod somewhat resembles the 
keys of an ash tree, is compressed, long, membranous, tongue- 
* Notice sur l’Ailante glanduleux, par A. Dupuis, p. 12. 
