THE WESTERN PLANE. 371 
favourable conditions, especially when planted 
near water, it will rise to the height of forty feet 
in the extraordinarily short period of ten years. 
Indeed, it is recorded by Mr. Loudon, that a 
specimen of Platanus occidentalis planted in the 
garden of Lambeth Palace had, in twenty years, 
from 1797 to 1817, grown to the great height of 
eighty feet, having a trunk eight feet in cir- 
cumference at three feet from the ground—the 
diameter of its head of foliage being no less than 
forty-eight feet. In twenty years more, namely, by 
the year 1837, this remarkable Tree had reached 
a height of a hundred feet. It is its power of 
rapid growth, its utility as a town Tree, and the 
facility with which it can be propagated, either 
by cuttings, layers, or seeds, that have led to the 
extensive cultivation of the Western or American 
Plane, called also in the country of its origin 
Button Wood, Water Beech, Sycamore, and Cotton 
Tree. In American forests this beautiful Tree 
reaches an enormous size, its trunk not un- 
frequently measuring forty feet in circumference 
at five feet from the ground. One instance, 
indeed, has been given of a Plane which, on the 
