208 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
Europe. The two cedars in the Chelsea Botanic Garden, which 
remain out of the four planted in 1683, are, says Loudon 
(Arboretum, vol. iv., p. 2406), in a state of decay, which shows 
that they had passed their maturity; but they are growing in a 
poor sandy soil, mixed with gravel, resting at 2 feet deep on a 
hard subsoil. The same author says (Arboretum, vol. i., p. 48) 
that there is at Enfield a cedar which was in a state of decay in 
1821, and this cedar is only at the utmost as old as those at 
Chelsea. Amongst a great number of cedars planted in France 
in 1735, the same year in which was planted the one in the 
Jardin des Plantes, those growing in deep loam show no sign of 
decay. 
The cedar acquires during its early years a larger girth of stem, 
but I do not believe that it attains to the same height as several 
firs and pines in Europe; and in support of this belief, I give the 
following measurements :— 
Varennes de Fenille reports that the cedar in the Jardin des 
Plantes in 1786, that is to say, fifty-two years after it was planted, 
was 6 feet 7 inches in girth at 4 feet 6 inches from the ground. 
M. L.-Deslongchamps says that he measured this cedar in 1812 
at the same height, and that it then girthed 8 feet 8 inches; 
in 1837 he measured it again, and found it 10 feet. I measured 
this tree on the 27th of May 1844, when it girthed 10 feet, having 
made no increase in the interval since 1837. I could not take its 
girth at the ground, because it was surrounded with a bank of 
stones, and its height was only 56 feet. I ought to mention that 
they had earthed up the base of the tree, an injurious practice 
which should be avoided, and in measuring the girth, allowance 
had to be made for the height above the primitive soil. The 
height of the tree would have been greater if its head had not 
been broken about fifty years before by a musket shot. The soil 
in which it grows is poor, and contains a great deal of plaster 
brought from the demolitions in Paris. Allowing it to be one 
hundred and fifteen years old in 1844, its leading shoot had made 
an annual growth of nearly 6 inches to that date. 
The cedar at Vrigny, planted in 1757 by Duhamel-Dumonceau, 
was about eighty-four years old in 1844; and in the autumn of that 
year its diameter at 3 feet from the ground was 5 feet, its height 
was 80 feet, and the spread of its branches was 76 feet. At 13 feet 
from the ground it divides into several forks, but as one of these 
continues the trunk, the tree has a straight stem, The annual 
