May 25. 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
129 
WEEKLY CALENDAR. 
M 
! D 
D 
W 
Weather near London in 
1853. 
Sun j Sun 
Rises. | Sets. 
Moon 
R. & S. 
Moon’s 
Age. 
Day of 
Year. 
MAY 25—31, 1854. 
Barometer. Thermo. Wind. 
Rain in 
Inches. 
af. Sun. 
25 
Th 
Ascen. Holy Tii. Prs. Helena 
29 . 735 — 29.576 i 72—40 
E. 
_ 
57 a 3 1 56 a 7 
3 26 
28 
3 
24 
145 
26 
F 
[b. 1846. 
29.576—29.526 76—48 
E. 
— 
56 57 
sets. 
© 
3 
18 
146 
27 
S 
King of Hanover b. 1919. 
29.642—29.583 73—4fi 
N. 
18 
55 59 
8 a 58 
1 
3 
11 
147 
j 28 
Sun 
Sunday after Ascension. 
29.703—29.669 63—43 
S.W. 
02 
54 VIII 
10 2 
2 
3 
4 
148 
29 
M 
King Ciias. II. IIest., 1G60. 
29 - 861 — 29 .817 ! 66—41 
N.K. 
08 
53 1 
10 56 
3 
2 
57 
149 
30 
Tu 
Colymbetes collaris. 
29.974—29.940 65—48 
N.E. 
— 
52 2 
11 38 
4 
2 
49 
150 
3] 
w 
Colymbetes conspersus. 
30.014—29.909 55—50 
N. 
02 
51 3 
morn. 
5 
2 
41 
151 
Meteorology of the Week. —At Chiswick,from observations during the last twenty-seven years,theaverage highest andlowesttem- 
peratures of these (lays are 67.5° and 44.1° respectively. The greatest heat, 91°, 
25th in 1839. During the period 117 days were flue, and on 72 rain fell. 
occurred on tlie 28th in 1847 i and the lowest cold 
29 °, 
on the 
One of the many wonders of the world is the yearly, 
we might say daily, discovery of new Plants. From the 
days of Solomon, not only have there been multitudes 
of writers about plants, hut travellers and searchers 
after them;—Botanists who have devoted their lives to 
; examining the earth’s surface to discover species un- 
j known before, and thousands of volumes record the 
i results of their enquiries. All of these explorers have 
discovered something new, and yet, when we are ready 
to conclude that the Flora of any last-examined district 
must he exhausted, we are startled by an announce¬ 
ment, that some other “ culler of simples ” has gone 
over the same ground, and made discoveries more won¬ 
drous than any of his predecessors. 
We remember expressing surprise to a Mahomedau 
at finding a lost article in a place which he had re¬ 
peatedly examined in his search for it, and his reply— 
; “ God is great—it was not to be found by your servant”— 
often rises before us when we read of these wonderful 
S discoveries. “ There is a time for all things and this 
is impressed upon us the more forcibly by the fact, that 
I the plants left to be discovered in these days are pot 
■ some microscopic Moss, or cave-hidden Fungus, but 
! some of the giants of the vegetable world—the Victoria 
\ regia among aquatics, and the Wellingtonia gigantea 
among our mountain trees—wonders of the vegetable 
world, which even the most careless passenger must 
have paused to look upon with surprise when first pre¬ 
sented to his view. 
It is of the Wellingtonia gigantea that we have to 
offer a few notes, but before doing so, let us draw atten¬ 
tion to the fact, that important discoveries of novelties 
are not confined to those who tread the paths of the 
! vegetable kingdom; they occur also to the Zoologist and 
' the Mineralogist, as is testified by the notice of the 
Shanghae fowl being first announced within these few 
i years, and the discovery of gold in Australia being still 
j more recent. 
When first we read the description of this gigautic 
tree, we remembered this passage in Sir W. Hooker’s 
“ Companion to the Botanical Magazine,” being an 
extract from a letter written by one of the martyrs of 
l science, Mr. Douglas—“ The great beauty of Califor- 
j niau vegetation is a species of Taxodium, which gives 
j the mountains a most peculiar, I was almost going to 
| say awful; appearance; something which plainly tells 
i us we are not in Europe. I have repeatedly measured 
specimens of this tree 270 feet long and 32 feet round, 
at three feet from the ground. Some few I saw upwards 
of 300 feet high, but none in which the thickness was 
greater than those I have instanced.” (ii., 150.) We 1 
suspected that these and the trees discovered by Mr. j 
Lobb were of the same species, but a note published j 
by the latter, in the Gardeners' Chronicle, seems to refute j 
that suspicion. He says ;— 
“ Douglas’s journeys seldom exceeded thirty miles from the 
coast, and if he visited the grounds in latitude 38° 15' N., 
tlie only Coniferous tree he could have seen for twenty 
miles from the coast was Taxodium sempervirens, some 
scattered specimens of Abies Douglasi, and Finns Edqariana. 
From twenty miles from the coast eastward to an elevation 
of 1000 feet on the Sierra Nivada, scarcely a coniferous tree 
of any kind exists. Hartweg travelled over Douglas’s tract 
from south to north, and never saw Wellingtonia, from which 
I venture to say that that plant was never found except in 
the locality which is more than 1G0 miles from the coast, 
and full 120 miles from Douglas’s track. The tree alluded 
to by Douglas is unquestionably the Taxodium sempervirens 
of Lambert, or Sequoia of Endliclier, which Douglas must 
have seen in great abundance, both on the mountains of 
Santa Cruz and of Santa Lucia. From my own knowledge 
of this tree, it abounds along the coast from latitude 35° 30', 
to Humboldt in latitude 41° north, which may be its northern 
limits. It occupies the deep, gloomy ravines of the western 
slopes of the mountains, rarely on the east sides, and 
seldom beyond the elevation of 2000 feet above the level of 
tfio sea. Taxodium sempervirens is the largest tree I saw in 
California before the discovery of Wellingtonia ; it presents 
tq the eye all the beauty and grandeur that Douglas lias de- j 
scribed. I have often seen trees 300 feet high, and from | 
ten feet to fifteen feet in diameter.” 
This size, however, is not the extreme to which the 
Taxodium attains, or else Mr. Hartweg had seen one 
specimen of the Wellingtonia ; for Messrs. Knight and 
Perry, in their “ Synopsis of Coniferous Plants,” 
quoting him as an authority, state that—“ One tree, 
which was called by the American settlers ‘ the Giant of 
the Forest,’ measured 270 feet in height, and had a 
trunk fifty-five feet in circumference at six feet from j 
the ground.” This, even, is small compared with a 
specimen of Taxodium distichum measured by Mr | 
fiartweg, in Mexico. “ This tree,” he says, “ stands in 
the village of Santa Maria del Ule, about seven leagues 
south-east of Oaxaca; it measures, at six feet from the 
ground, ninety-eight feet in circumference, and is, 1 j 
believe, the largest tree of its kind on record. At the i 
height of forty feet, the branches, each of which are 
good sized trees, of several feet diameter, separate. The 
top, enormous although it appears, is not in proportion 
to the stem, both together measuring barely 100 feet in 
No. CCXCV., Vol. XII. 
