THE CYPRESS. 



Owpret/sus seviperri'rcns L. 



The associations of some trees are ineffaceable. 

 Though in neither form nor colour has the Cypress 

 any suggestion of grief or gloom to the dweller in 

 Northern Europe who may be ignorant of its name 

 and history, the customs and language of ages have, 

 in its own Southern climes, indelibly impressed upon 

 it the symbolism of bodily death and spiritual im- 

 mortality. 



The Cypress (Cupressus sernpervirens L.) is 

 generally a flame-shaped, tapering, cone^like tree, with 

 but a short stem below its branches, which rise 

 erectly and close to the trunk, much as in the Lom- 

 bardy Poplar. Even in its native country it seldom 

 exceeds fifty or sixty feet in height;- and in our 

 climate its average rate of growth is from a foot to 

 eighteen inches per annum for the first eight or ten 

 years, and after that it lengthens more slowly, so that 

 trees forty years of age are seldom as many feet in 

 height. After reaching a height of between thirty and 

 forty feet its growth is often almost imperceptible. 

 Nevertheless, the largest specimens in England have 

 reached considerably larger dimensions. In the climate 

 of Devonshire, which is peculiarly favourable to this 

 class of tree, a specimen is recorded by Loudon, at 

 Kenton, which had reached a diameter of two feet and 

 a height of sixty feet in thirty-eight years. Probably 

 i7 57 



