THE STONE PINE. 
i6i 
the Mediterranean, in which region it is native. The date of 
its introduction to Britain is not known, but it has been in culti- 
vation here certainly for more than three centuries and a half, 
for Turner mentions it in his “ Names of Herbes in Greke, Latin, 
Englishe, Duch, and Frenche,” published in 1548. In its native 
countries it attains a height of sixty to eighty feet, but in this 
country the finest examples are only about thirty-five feet, 
whilst ordinary British-grown examples are only half that 
height. Its trunk, covered with rugged, and deeply fissured, 
thick, red-grey bark, forks at no great distance from the roots, 
