NURSERY AND PLANTING. 



135 



following. When the process of laying is to be adopted, it 

 should be done in October, and will, by the autumn following, 

 be well rooted, when they should be taken off the stools, and 

 planted out in nursery-lines to get strength. As the foliage 

 of this tree is large, it is therefore necessary to allow it plenty 

 of room in the nursery; say, from twenty inches to two feet 

 between the lines, and from a foot to eighteen inches from 

 plant to plant, in the line, i^llian, and other authors, have 

 given strange accounts of this tree ; such as the etiect it had 

 on Xerxes, at the head of his army, and his having medals of 

 gold stamped with its figure, which he carried constantly 

 about his person. The Licinian Platanus has been recorded to 

 have exceeded eighty feet in circumference, and capable of 

 accommodating within its trunk the Consul Licinius Mutianus 

 and his retinue. It has not ever attained any extraordinary 

 bulk in this country, and, considering its early introduction, 

 may rather be considered a rare tree, particularly as it has not 

 fallen a sacrifice to the severity from climate like the following. 



American Plane. — {Platanus Occidentalis.) 



A much tenderer species than the last, and introduced 

 here from America, as the name implies, in 1610, about 

 one hundred years after the Eastern Plane. This, like the 

 last, attains an enormous size in their native countries, but 

 with us can only be reckoned upon as a tree of the third or 

 fourth class of magnitude, and limited to the lawn or more 

 sheltered parts of the park. The almost general destruction 

 of this species by frost, about the middle of the last century, 

 and the partial loss of many others in 1809, have alarmed 

 planters from propagating this tree so extensively as could 

 have been wished. Many trees of this species, of a consider- 

 able size, existed previously to the first of these disasters in 

 many parts of England, as at Sion-House, Pain's-Hill, Kew, 

 Stow, and some other places, but which fell a sacrifice to the 

 inclemency of our climate. And, in 1809, almost all the trees 

 of a large size of this species were killed, while those from 

 twenty to twenty-five feet were not materially injured, and 

 those of a smaller size were not injured at all. The v/mtcr's 



