628 The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland 



tree had been measured twenty years earlier by Washington, when it was nearly the 

 same size. Michaux measured one, 36 miles from Marietta on the road from 

 Wheeling, on the Ohio, 47 feet in girth at 4 feet, which kept the same size for 15 to 

 20 feet, and then forked into several branches. This tree was hollow. 



Ridgway records^ a tree in Gibson County, Indiana, 160 feet high, 30 feet 

 in girth at the smallest part of the trunk, with a spread of 134 feet by 112 feet; 

 another in Wabash County 168 feet high, 25 feet in girth, and 68 feet to the first 

 branch ; another 83^ feet to the first branch, but only 9 feet in girth. He found the 

 prostrate trunk of a tree near Mount Carmel, in Illinois, which was much larger 

 than any of those above mentioned. The decayed base measured 60 feet in circum- 

 ference ; and at 20 feet from the ground, where the tree divided into three large 

 limbs, it was still about 62 feet round. Each of the three limbs was about 70 

 feet long by 5 feet in diameter, so that the total cubic contents by quarter-girth 

 measurement must have been over 8ocx) feet. None of these were quite so tall, but 

 much larger in girth than, the largest Tulip tree on record, and I know of no broad- 

 leaved tree in the northern hemisphere which equals these dimensions. The largest 

 which I actually saw myself, shown me by Dr. Schneck near Mount Carmel, 

 measured 150 feet by 25 feet, and was standing in a cornfield. In New England 

 it does not attain anything approaching these dimensions, the largest mentioned by 

 Emerson, near Lancaster, Mass., being 18 feet in girth at 6 feet, and holding its 

 size for 20 feet, and with a broad head of great height. 



Cultivation 



This tree is unsuited to our climate, and though seedlings are frequently raised 

 at Kew, they never live more than a few years, and suffer severely from frosts. 

 One tree raised from Michigan seed attained a height of about 12 feet, but became 

 badly attacked by disease, and was removed about a year ago. So far as we know, 

 there is not a single tree of this species of any size now growing in Britain. 



Thomas Rivers, in an interesting article,^ states that in 1820 there were in his 

 nursery stools of/*, occidentalis, which had been planted by his grandfather in 1780. 

 These stools gave shoots with enormous, almost circular slightly-lobed leaves ; but 

 the young shoots always died down. From 1830 to 1840 he imported seeds of the 

 American tree, which gave plants like these stools, but never lived for any length of 

 time. He quotes Sir W. J. Hooker's statement : " We often raise young plants of 

 P. occidentalis from American seed ; but the annual shoots are killed every winter."' 

 Rivers believed that the American plane had never existed in England so as to form 

 large specimens, and that those mentioned as being large trees by Miller in 1759 and 

 by Loudon in 1838 were not the true occidentalis. 



The tree is equally rare on the Continent. M. Gadeceau, who wrote two 

 papers* on the differences between the occidental and oriental planes, knew of 



' Proc. U.S. Nat. Museum, 1882, p. 288. ' Card. Chron. 1856, p. 86, and i860, p. 47. 



'But this is not always the case, as I planted out two seedlings of P. occidentalis, raised at Kew in the autumn of 1 906, 

 and they have remained healthy throughout the cold wet summer of 1907. 



Bull. Soc Sc. Nal. Nantes, iv. 105 (1894), and Rev. Hort., 1907, p. 205. 



