PINASTER, OR CLUSTER PINE. 



441 



of Asia, and a Pinaster from seed imported from China has 

 been raised in the garden of the Horticultural Society, 

 though there is some doubt whether the species had not 

 been originally carried from Europe to that country. The 

 growth of the Pinaster in a suitable soil is rapid and luxu- 

 riant, and in the course of fifty or sixty years it reaches a 

 height of from forty to as much as sixty feet, with a trunk 

 of corresponding diameter. Its leaves are 

 from six to eight inches long, very strong 

 and rigid, of a lighter green than those of 

 Pinus laricio, and are thickly-clustered 

 towards the ends of the branches, an ap- 

 pearance rendered still more striking by 

 the bare spaces left at the bottom of each 

 annual shoot by the decadence of the male 

 catkins, which, when in bloom, surround 

 the lower part of the shoots. The sheaths 

 containing the leaves are nearly three 

 quarters of an inch long, imbricated, and, 

 when old, of a blackish colour. The bark 

 of the trunk is always deeply-furrowed 

 and of a dark brown colour, and the 

 terminal buds are large, covered with 

 brown, chaffy, involuted scales, and perfectly free from 

 any resinous coating. The cones, which frequently mea- 

 sure five inches in length, are placed in whorls round 

 the branches, pointing outwards in star-like clusters, from 

 three to as many as seven or eight together ; they first 

 appear upon the shoots of the current year of a purplish 

 colour, then change to green, and when matured, which 

 takes place in the autumn of the second year, become of 

 a rich and shining brown. The scales, which are an inch 

 and a half in length, terminate in regular rhomboidal pyra- 



