ON THE CEDAR OF LEBANON, ETC. 205 
they were 3 feet high, in the Botanic Gardens at Chelsea, and 
which are believed to have been among the first planted in 
England, ‘‘have produced during several years a great number 
of male flowers, but that three only have yielded cones, which 
only attained maturity after thirty-five years ; that now (in 1766) 
the seeds which fall from the cones produce plants in abundance 
and without any care.” 
M. Vilmorin has, on his property of Verrieres, about fifteen 
miles from Paris, a cedar which began to produce male flowers at 
twenty-three years old, and cones at twenty-eight years. He says, 
“T have noticed in the park of Fromont that cedars about twenty- 
eight years old bore cones. I have a cedar which was planted in 
1804 by my father, and which, as yet, has yielded no flowers. 
M. Gayau has some cedars thirty miles from here, which were 
planted in 1815, and which have not yet fruited. It is possible 
that these trees bear flowers and cones less regularly in France 
and England than in those countries to which they are indigenous.” 
Seeds and Natural Seed-bed.—I have already said that plants 
have been raised from the natural seed-beds round the cedar in 
the Jardin des Plantes, round the cedars at Vrigny, and round 
those in the garden of M. Guy. A friend tells me that he has 
remarked cedars at Marcigny (Saone and Loire), the property of 
M. Polissard, which yield an abundance of plants from the natural 
seed-bed, and that among these plants there are some already over 
six feet in height. M. Vilmorin, in a note on the TZraité 
Pratique de la Culture des Pins, by Delamarre, page 319, says 
that he has seen a quantity of young plants spring up under the 
fine cedars in the park of Bellevue, near Meudon, and that a cedar 
planted by his father in a garden he had in Paris in the Faubourg 
Saint Antoine has also often produced young plants which were 
self-sown in the grove where it grew. It is probable then, that 
the cedar may be able to perpetuate itself in France by self-sown 
seeds as in its native country. 
From what has been stated, there is not sufficient data to 
indicate the exact age at which the cedar begins to yield fertile 
seed to supply a natural seed-bed, but it can scarcely be before it 
is sixty years old. As to the proper age of cedars when the cones 
may be gathered for the seed, I think it would be prudent never 
to gather any from a tree less than sixty years old. We have 
seen that the seed in the cones is fertile in the spring of the 
second year; and it is from these, and even from younger cones, 
