i68 
THE ESSEX NATURALIST. 
Several trees are to be seen in Woodford and Snaresbrook 
gardens, where one of the Red-woods is about 40 feet high. 
Sequoias have cones with shield-shaped bracts, each bearing 
many ovules. S. gigantea has stiff, pointed, scale-like foliage, 
while S. sempervirens has foliage like the Yew. In both species, 
the red-brown felt-like bark is very thick. To give an idea of 
the stupendous size the Mammoth Trees attain, figures seem to 
convey but an imperfect impression. One of the trees felled 
in the Yosemite Valley had a girth of 93 feet near the base, a 
height of 363 feet, and the bark was a foot and a half thick ; the 
age, calculated by the number of annual rings, was over 3,000 
years. 
Taxodium distichum, the Swamp, Bald or Deciduous Cypress, 
is remarkable amongst conifers in shedding its leaf-shoots every 
year. The bright-green feathery foliage appears about the begin¬ 
ning of May. The ripe cone is about the size of a pigeon’s egg, 
and consists of hard shield-shaped bracts, each bearing two seeds. 
When growing in wet ground, curious hollow knee-like branches 
grow up from the roots, which are thought to have an aerating 
function. The Bald Cypress inhabits swampy land in the 
Southern States of North America, where it is a large andvalua- 
able tree. Mention has already been made of its remains having 
been found in the Bovey Tracey beds, associated with Sequoia. 
It has long been cultivated in England, having been introduced 
in the time of Charles I. It may be seen in several gardens in 
this neighbourhood ; one tree at Snaresbrook is especially 
well grown and is about 50 feet high. 
We now come to the Cypress group, many species of which 
are not easy to distinguish without their cones. 
Libocedrus decunens (syn. Thuya gigantea Nutt.), the 
Incense Cedar, is a noble tree in its home in the Sierra Nevada 
(“Snowy Mountains ) of California. Old trees have a straight 
trunk from 40 to 140 feet high, crowned with an umbrella-shaped 
top. The pointed compressed scale-like foliage is arranged 
in four rows, in two opposite pairs, two median, two marginal; 
but the pairs are so nearly on a level as almost to form a whorl 
of four, which gives a jointed aspect to the stiff ascending branch- 
lets. Cones are very rarely produced in England. A small 
tree about 18 feet high grows in a Snaresbrook garden. 
The genus Thuya, or Arbor-Vitae, differs from Libocedrus. 
