PL A 



OR, BOTANICAL DICTIONARY. 



P L A 



359 



is not sufficient warmth, which if required, to ripen many 

 foreign fruits, they must necessarily drop off in its immature 

 statet Drought and sterile soil not unfrequently deprive us 

 of the fruit which we expected. Careful watering may assist 

 us here greatly. The larvse of various insects, and often 

 these themselves, when perfect, rot and destroy the fruit. 

 Winds, old age, and accidents, often disappoint our hopes 

 of gathering fruit. Here no remedies are of avail, except 

 avoiding the occasional causes. From too great a quantity 

 of sap, many a fruit-tree throws off its fruits. This happens 

 from the same cause that plants do not blossom for super- 

 abundance of sap ; and the means above recommended in that 

 case may serve us here as well. Most bulbous plants, when 

 the sap accumulates, drop their immature fruit : they should 

 therefore be planted in dry ground. Some bulbous plants 

 indeed only then ripen their seeds, if their unripe fruit be cut 

 off with the stem, and kept thus lying for some time. If a 

 plant which requires particularly fresh air and insects, blossom 

 in the middle of winter, or, to speak more generally, in a cold 

 season, fruit will seldom be produced. In this case, nothing 

 can be done, unless, indeed, by some artificial mode of treat- 

 ment, the plant be made to blossom again in spring and 

 summer." See Blights. 



Platanus ; a genus of the class Monacia, order Polyan- 

 dria. GENERIC CHARACTER. Male Flowers, compound, 

 forming a globular ament. Calix : a very few small jags. 

 Corolla: scarcely apparent. Stamina: filamenta oblong, 

 thicker at top, coloured ; antherse four-cornered, growing 

 round the filamentum at the lower part. Female Flowers, 

 forming a globe, numerous, on the same tree. Calix: scales 

 many, very small. Corolla: petals many, concave, oblong, 

 club-shaped. Pistil : germina many, awl-shaped, ending in 

 awl-shaped styles, with a recurved stigma. Pericarp: none; 

 fruits many, collected into a globe. Seed: roundish, placed 

 on a bristle-shaped peduncle, and terminated by the awl- 

 shaped style ; with a capillary pappus adhering to the base 

 of the seed. ESSENTIAL CHARACTER. Male. Calix: ament 

 globular. Corolla: scarcely apparent. Anthera : growing 

 round the filamentum. Female. Calix: ament globular. 

 Corolla: many-petalled. Stigma: recurved. Seeds: round- 

 ish, mucronate with the style, pappose at the base. The 



species are, 



1. Platanus Orientalis ; Oriental Plane Tree. Leaves 

 subpalmate, five-lobed ; nerves smoothish underneath. This 

 is a native of Asia, where it becomes very large. The stem 

 is tall, erect, and covered with a smooth bark, which annu- 

 ally falls off; it sends out many side-branches, which are 

 generally a little crooked at their joints. The flowers come 

 out upon long peduncles hanging downwards, each sustain- 

 ing five or six round balls of flowers ; the upper, which are 

 the largest, are more than four inches in circumference ; they 

 sit very close to the peduncle. The flowers are so small as 

 to be scarcely distinguished without glasses; they come oul 

 a little before the leaves, which appear at the beginning ol 

 June : and in warm summers the seeds will ripen late in 

 autumn, and if left upon the trees will remain till spring, when 

 the balls fall to pieces, and the bristly down which surrounds 

 the seeds helps to transport them to a great distance with 

 the wind. There are several varieties ; two of which are 

 the Maple-leaved Plane, and the Spanish Plane-tree : the 

 first has heart-shaped leaves, five-lobed, smooth, distant 

 toothed, abrupt and three-ribbed at the base ; the second 

 leaves three or five lobed, toothed, wedge-shaped and elon- 



K -rated at the base, triple-ribbed, nearly smooth. The Plane- 

 ree has always been much esteemed in the eastern countries 

 vhere it grows naturally, for its beauty and grateful shade 

 VOL. ii. 96. 



Pausanius tells us of a Plane-tree of extraordinary size and 

 jeauty in Arcadia, supposed to be planted by Menelaus ; so 

 .hat the age of the tree when he saw it must have been about 

 ;hirteen hundred years. That this tree was large and hand- 

 some, we can easily believe ; but the age is incredible, espe- 

 cially allowing the tree to be sound when seen by Pausanias. 

 Pliny mentions one in Lycia that had mouldered away into 

 an immense cave, eighty feet in circumference. Caligula 

 also had a tree of this sort, at his villa near Velitrse : the 

 hollow of the trunk held fifteen persons at di-nner, with a 

 proper suite of attendants. Evelyn, Miller, and Gilpin, have 

 related at length from .Elian, the adoration that was paid 

 by Xerxes to a tree of this sort in Phrygia. And wherever 

 any sumptuous buildings were erected in that country, the 

 porticoes which opened to the air generally terminated in 

 groves or lines of these trees. It was no less esteemed in 

 Italy, after it was introduced there; and Pliny informs us 

 that it was first brought over the Ionian sea into the island 

 of Diomedes, for a monument to that hero : thence it passed 

 into Sicily, and then into Italy. The same ancient author 

 asserts, that there is no tree whatsoever which so well defends 

 us from the heat of the sun in summer, or that admits it more 

 kindly in winter ; the branches being produced at a distance 

 proportioned to the largeness of the leaves, so that when the 

 leaves are fallen in winter, the branches easily admit the 

 rays of the sun. Lady Craven mentions some Plane-trees 

 which she saw in the Turkish dominions, of a size so gigan- 

 tic, that the largest trees we have in England would have 

 appeared like besom-sticks in comparison. It is generally 

 supposed that this tree was introduced into England by the 

 great Lord Chancellor Bacon, who planted a good many of 

 them at Verulam, where they were flourishing in 1706, but 

 were destroyed a few years back. The Turks used to build 

 most of their ships with this timber, which is hard, close, 

 takes a fine polish, and is valuable for a variety of useful 

 purposes. In Great Britain it is merely considered as an 

 ornamental tree, and is even less common than the next 

 species in our plantations. Notwithstanding its backward- 

 ness in coming out in the spring, and the sudden decay of 

 its leaves in autumn, yet for its handsome appearance, and 

 the great size to which it will grow, it deserves a place in all 

 large plantations, especially near mansions, or on a moist 

 soil, and near streams of water, in which situations it will 

 arrive at a prodigious magnitude. Culture. This species is 

 propagated either from seeds or by layers, the latter of which 

 is generally practised in England ; though the plants thus 

 raised seldom make such straight trees as those which are 

 produced from seeds. It has however been generally thought, 

 that the seeds of this tree were not productive, merely 

 because they have not been sown at a proper season, nor 

 managed rightly. Mr. Miller saw thousands of the young 

 plants spring up from the seeds of a large tree, which were 

 scattered upon the ground in a moist place ; and found that 

 if the seeds are sown soon after they are ripe, in a moist 

 shady situation, they will rise extremely well ; and the plants 

 thus obtained will make a considerable progress after the 

 second year, being much hardier, and less liable to lose 

 their tops in winter, than those which are propagated by 

 layers. And as the seeds often ripen in England, they may 

 be propagated in as great abundance as any other forest tree. 

 See the next species. 



2. Platanus Occindetalis ; Western or American Plane Tree. 

 Leaves with five angles, slightly lobed, toothed, wedge- 

 shaped at the base ; nerves tomentose underneath. Stemi 

 straight, and of equal girth in most parts of the length. The 

 branches extend wide on every side. The young ones have 

 4 Y 



