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larix amabilis , a tree with the deciduous leaves of the Larch and 
large cones erect on the branches with scales which fall when mature 
from the axis of the cone like those of Fir-trees and the Cedar of 
Lebanon. As a wild tree not much is yet known of the distribution, 
size and economic value of Pseudolarix. Robert Fortune, who was 
sent to China by the London Horticultural Society in 1843 as a botan¬ 
ical collector, first made known this tree to Europeans. He found it 
first in temple gardens growing in pots and much stunted; and it was 
not until 1854 in a journey in the province of Chekiang that Fortune 
found Pseudolarix growing in the open ground at the monastery of 
Tsan-tsin. “They were growing,” he writes, “in the vicinity of a 
Buddhist monastery in the western part of the Province of Chekiang 
at an elevation of 1000 or 1500 feet above the level of the sea. Their 
stems which measured fully five feet in circumference two feet from 
the ground, carried this size, with a slight diminution, to a height of 
fifty feet, this being the height of the lower branches. The total 
height I estimated about 120 or 130 feet. The stems were perfectly 
straight throughout, the branches symmetrical, slightly inclined to a 
horizontal form, and having the appearance of something between the 
Cedar and the Larch.” Fortune found these trees, which had probably 
been planted, covered with cones and sent seeds home to England. 
Unfortunately only a small percentage of them germinated. The fol¬ 
lowing autumn, in the hope of securing another supply of seeds, For¬ 
tune explored a higher range in the western part of Chekiang on which 
he had heard that the Pseudolarix was more abundant. Here he found 
at altitudes just below 4000 feet a larger number of both large and 
small trees which he thought had also been planted. The largest tree 
which Fortune saw at this high altitude he estimated to be one hun¬ 
dred and thirty feet high; the trunk was eight feet in circumference, 
and the lower branches nearly touched the ground. There were no cones 
on these trees and Fortune was told by the monks that cones were only 
produced on alternate years. He dug up a few plants which finally 
reached England, and it is probable that the largest trees now growing 
in Europe and the United States were of this sending. After Fortune’s 
visit to the Chekiang Mountains in 1855, Pseudolarix was not seen 
again in China until 1878 when Charles Maries, a botanical traveller for 
the Veitch’s of London, found it at the Temple of Teen Cha on the 
Lushan Range in Kiangsi and sent seeds to England. The last botan¬ 
ist to see the Pseudolarix in China, E. H. Wilson, met with it in 
August, 1907, at an altitude of about 4000 feet on the Lushan Range 
near Ruling which is the most western station where this tree has been 
seen in China by foreigners. The larger trees near Ruling had been 
planted but Wilson saw small trees on the mountain side which were 
evidently wild, and it is probable, therefore, that these small trees are 
the only self-sown trees of Pseudolarix seen by European botanical 
travellers unless the “forests of the Larch-fir” on the mountains south 
of Poyang Lake in Riangsi which were mentioned by Barrow in his 
“Travels in China,” published in 1804, and which as Wilson has pointed 
out must have been Pseudolarix, were wild trees. In spite of all of 
Fortune’s efforts to introduce this tree into Europe it has not become 
common. The largest specimen in Europe is in the Rovelli nursery at 
Pallanza on Lake Magiore in Italy. In 1907 this tree was sixty-four feet 
