rare trees in abbotshury castle gardens. isu 



Sequoia. 



Sequoia made its first appearance in the Wcalden age and had 

 its fullest development and widest distribution in the Cretaceous 

 Beds. No less than 30 species have been met with between 

 the Wealden and Miocene ages from the Polar regions to Nebraska, 

 ajttd in the South of France and Italy. It is now restricted to 

 two species, both in a limited area of N. America. S. senipervirens 

 end on the coast of California and S. giganteani, Terry (Wellingtonia), 

 in the Sierra Nevada. The leaves are polymorphous, varying 

 with the species ; some are forked or falcate ; others linear and 

 straight. They differ so much in form and size that the early 

 botanists considered branches from the same tree to belong to a 

 different species. The male-cones are persistent, and at the 

 summit of the lateral branches. In the living species the female 

 cones are solitary ; but in some of the fossil forms they are clustered. 



The foliage of S. senipervirens is distichous, that of >S'. gigmitea 

 is spirally imbricated. The former, better known as Red ivood, 

 occupies a sandy ridge rising to a height of 2,000 feet in dense 

 forests, 20 or 30 miles wide from the south of Santa Cruz to the 

 southern border of Oregon. Professor Boland says its distribution 

 depends upon the sandstones and oceanic fogs. 



Count Saporta speaks of a forest composed of Sequoias in the 

 Cretaceous beds of PatterfcU in the Polar regions, carpeted with 

 ferns and cycads. It is probable that the distichous and imbricated 

 foliage was united in the same spe^;ies in its earliest form. 

 In the Tertiaries of Greenland S. sempervirens and ^. 

 Langdorji arc distichous. Sequoia is met with in the Eocene 

 basalts of Mull, in the Miocenes of the Baltic, Switzerland, 

 Germany, and Italy. It predominated in the later Kocene 

 (Oligocenc) ; afterwards it showed symptoms of decline and 

 disappeared entirely with the exception of the t\vo living species. 



Araucaria. 

 Araucaria appeared for the first time in the Secondary age. It 

 has been found in the Stonesfield States of Oxfordshire, and in the 



