276 THE LARCH 



healthy wood round the canker, but a vast number 

 succumb, and when a larch wood is badly affected the 

 best thing to do is to fell all the diseased trees and 

 underplant with some shade-bearing trees like beech, 

 silver fir, or the giant cypress. 



The last-named tree (Thuya gigantea or plicata, 

 according to the latest Kew nomenclature) is coming 

 to the front as one of the most valuable exotics for 

 planting in Britain, as Mr. Peter Lawson told me forty 

 years ago it would. It is very easily propagated. Six 

 years ago I raised 50,000 or 60,000 from 15s. worth of 

 seed which are now six feet high. In British Columbia 

 the timber of this beautiful tree is reckoned next in 

 value to that of the Douglas fir, and its durability is 

 extraordinary. In Messrs Elwes and Henry's sump- 

 tuous work on British and Irish Trees, there is a plate 

 representing a hemlock spruce 120 years old, rooted 

 astride of a trunk of the giant cypress, the wood of 

 which is as sound as on the day it fell. 



The persistence of the European larch in British 

 woodland seems gravely menaced, if not doomed ; for, 

 as if the canker fungus were not enough, a new and 

 formidable foe has travelled hither from North 

 America, to which too prolific neighbour Europe owes, 

 besides a lot of bad weather, the Phylloxera, the potato 

 beetle and the gooseberry mildew. The newcomer is 

 the large larch sawfly (Nematus EricJisoni), a pretty 

 little hymenopterous insect not half an inch long. 

 What it lacks in stature it makes up for in diligence 

 of procreation, defying all human effort to keep it in 

 check. The parent fly, provided with a sawing blade 



