376 The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland 



been supposed to occur in Mongolia and north China; but Mayr has recently 

 described the North China larch as a new species-Zar^'^ Principzs Rtipprechht. 

 In Siberia its most northerly limit is lat. 69 on the Yenesei and Kolyma, its southern 

 limit extending from the Ural at lat. 54° to the Altai in lat. 52\ 



The Siberian larch was reported by Kanitz ' to occur as a shrub m upper 

 and middle Moldavia at about 6000 feet elevation. He identified it on the authority 

 of Parlatore in a letter. I have seen no specimens from this locality, and consider 

 the identification very doubtful' ( • •/ 



An excellent account is given by Mayr^ of a plantation of this tree which was 

 made in 1 750-1 760 for the Czarina Elizabeth at Raivola on the Russian-Finnish 

 frontier north of St. Petersburg. The seed was procured from Ufa, and the trees 

 have on the better land grown remarkably straight and clean without branches for 

 20 metres up, and attain 40 metres in height with a diameter of 70 centimetres. 

 The wood of these trees, which was shown at the Paris exhibition of 1900, was of 

 remarkably good quality, and Prof Mayr recommends this tree strongly for 

 cultivation. But as summer does not commence in Finland until June, and the trees 

 had already turned yellow on September i8th, it is probable that the species is 

 not unlikely to succeed in Great Britain except perhaps in elevated districts in the 

 north and east of Scotland. 



On my journey to Siberia in 1897 I saw larches in the Ural mountains near 

 Zlataoust, but only after passing the watershed into Asia, and these were of no great 

 size. In the Altai they first appeared at about 3000 feet, and at 4000 feet they became 

 more numerous and larger, some of them 3 feet to 4 feet in diameter and about 100 

 feet high, but nearly all were dead at the top, and not yet in full leaf on 7th June. 

 They grow scattered in open forest on the drier hillsides as well as on marshy 

 flats, and where the soil is damper are often mixed with Picca obovata. 



Farther to the south in the upper valleys of the Katuna and Tchuya the larch 

 became the prevalent tree, and extends to a higher elevation than any other, 

 following the banks of the mountain streams on the Mongolian frontier up to about 

 7500 feet. At this elevation I saw a grove of young larches from 8 to 15 feet high, 

 and cut one of the smallest to count the rings, of which there were twenty-five in a 

 diameter of only i^ inch. Some of the old trees were remarkably stunted, only 10 to 

 12 feet high and 5 feet to 6 feet in girth. In this region the climate is extremely 

 severe, frost and snow occurring even in July. The bark of the tree is used all over 

 the region where it grows for covering the winter huts of the nomad Tartars, which 

 are in shape and construction very like the lodges of the Indians in Montana. 



Cultivation 



It was introduced by the Duke of Atholl in 1806 from Archangel, as stated 

 in the fourth volume of the Transactions of the Horticultural Society, p. 416, and 



' Plant. Romania, 139 (iSSi). Cf. also Janka, Flora Siebenbcrgens, xvi. 366 (1866). 

 ^ See distribution of the European larch. 

 Lot. cit. and Nattirw. Stud. Nordw. Kussl. Allg. Forst. u. J.-w. 1900. 



3 



