FRAGRANCE OF LOCUST TREE. 73 



to eight feet high, and can be removed to the places 

 where they are intended to stand. Those who raise 

 the common Robinia, sometimes thin out the one- 

 year old seedling plants, leaving the remainder 

 standing in the seed-bed six or eight inches apart till 

 they become two years old. In this period they often 

 attain an altitude of five or six feet, and are fit for 

 being permanently planted out without being pre- 

 viously transplanted into nursery lines. Its rapid 

 growth during infancy, as I have before stated, often 

 leads to erroneous calculations as to its after-growth 

 as a timber tree, the young branches being cut off by 

 frosts reduces its scale of annual growth very often to 

 that of most ordinary trees. This circumstance tends 

 to make the plant branchy, yet nevertheless it still 

 retains its natural inclination to grow erect. As it 

 grows older it assumes a more spreading habit, and 

 growing , less vigorously, is better adapted to endure 

 the winter, and it is after the tree has attained the age 

 of ten or twelve years that it wears its most beautiful 

 form, throwing out handsome white and yellowish 

 racemes, which possess great fragrance, though it 

 seldom blooms abundantly for successive seasons. 



As timber trees, the trunk has a tendency to get 

 hollow, like all other trees which have an inclination 

 to spread their roots near the surface of the ground. 



At Claremont there is a tree nearly seventy feet 

 high, the top having a diameter of fifty feet. 



In France it is grown extensively as coppice as 

 well as in the form of pollards, the wood being in 

 demand as props for vineyards, but in England in the 

 form of coppice it does not thrive as underwood, 

 where it cannot receive the full influence of the sun, 



