SEQUOIA WELLINGTON I A. 
2 3 
by the Queen, and the other by Prince Albert, in the Royal Horticultural Society’s Garden at South 
Kensington. One has been lately planted by her Majesty at Oxford, and others at various other cities. 
But a worse choice could scarcely have been made. As a rule, Conifers have a special antipathy to 
smoke, and an absolute necessity for pure air, the stifling atmosphere of the crowded city being death to 
them. The Wellingtonias are no exception to the general rule. In a very few years not one of the much- 
prized Victoria- and Albert-planted Wellingtonias will remain. The two at the Royal Horticultural 
Society’s Garden, at South Kensington, are rapidly deteriorating; the foliage has become thin, and the 
trees unhealthy-looking. There are only two years’ leaves upon them, and as each year’s growth has not 
exceeded half-a-foot, the reader can imagine how bare the trees have become. How many years may have 
to elapse before they expire, we cannot tell, but shall be agreeably surprised if it exceed half-a-dozen. The 
soot of the London atmosphere has deprived them of the freshness of their green. They are as black as the 
funereal Yew ; and this is not wholly due to the dust and soot deposited on them. The soot seems to 
impart (as it does to the grass around) some of its own colour intrinsically to the foliage, making it darker 
and blacker, and in summer forming a harsh and disagreeable contrast with the fresh pea-green of the 
young shoots. 
Cultivation. —The seeds, as already said, are like small scales, the cotyledons lying longitudinally in 
the middle. It requires some skill to know at a glance whether they are really ripe or not, but this can 
soon be found out by chewing them ; the want of substance in the unripe cotyledons then shewing itself. 
They germinate in about three weeks, when they are placed in a hot-house, or in frames where there is 
some heat. The young plants, on pushing their way up out of the earth, have their young bark of a brick- 
red or violaceous colour, and this continues during the whole of the first year. 
The young plants are very apt to damp off, unless allowed plenty of light and air ; and their young 
shoots and branches are also more liable than those of other Conifers to do so in close, moist weather, 
especially when deprived of a free circulation of air. This tendency continues even after they are picked 
out and planted in the open ground. Mr Westland, the gardener at Kingston Hall, Nottinghamshire, 
says, “ I saw a large plant of Wellingtonia killed at Thrumpton Hall, near here, which they stated was 
injured by the frost. Now, I doubted that, as I have seen hundreds of plants, from i foot to 18 inches 
high, go off in nurseries without apparently any cause; but I always considered that it was pot cultivation 
that caused it, and at that time they kept them in frames and under glass to forward their growth.” 
Young plants are reared with great ease and readiness from cuttings; and, what is most important, in 
the great majority of cases, they grow erect and readily form leaders. Indeed, to any but a nurseryman’s 
eye, it would often be difficult to distinguish between a seedling and a plant from a cutting of the same 
size. Should any of our readers wish to be knowing on the subject, we would recommend them to com¬ 
pare the spread of the lower branches in the one with that in the other. It is not the cutting which 
usually has them broadest; but even this is a fallible test, depending greatly upon the kind of slip out of 
which the young plant has been made. 
No stronger illustration of its willow-like readiness to grow can be given than the fact, which we have 
ourselves observed, of a young cone which had been plucked, and hung upside down in a phial of water 
(for the purpose of macerating and rotting off the chlorophyll, so as to make a skeleton of the ligneous 
core), actually sending out a rootlet from the axis at the apex of the cone. A seed or a plant put in the 
ground upside down, will push its shoot round so as to make its way back again above ground; it is its 
leaves and buds, however, which so make their way through the earth to upper air; but here it was not a 
shoot, a bud, or a leaf, which was pushed forward from the axis of the cone, but actually a rootlet. We 
never saw any similar case, nor do we remember ever to have met with an account of one. 
The tenacity of life of the Wellingto7tia is not more remarkable than its readiness to propagate by 
cuttings. The two are doubtless different phases of the same quality. The “ Mother of the Forest,” 
already mentioned as having been stripped of its bark to the height of 116 feet, is still flourishing. Beside 
20 ] m her 
