August 22, 1903. 
The Gardening World 
GENERAL NOTICES. 
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MOTTO FOR THE WEEK: 
“Nature holds in wood and field her thousand sunlit censers still.’— Whittier. 
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FOR 
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The following Coloured 
Plates have appeared { 
March 14.—NEW CHINESE PRIMULAS. < 
March28 —TEA ROSE “ CHAMELEON.” 
April 4.—COLEUS THYRSOIDEUS. 
April 18.—CESTRUM SMITHII. 
April 25 — JAPANESE PIGMY TREE. 
May 23.—Coloured Plate of SAXIFRAGA ; 
GRISEBACHII and A GROUP OF ALO 
CASIAS. < 
' May 30.—Coloured Plate of DENDROBIUM 
NOBILE ROTUNDIFLORUM and D.n. 
J NOBILIUS. < 
) June 6.—Monochrome plate of CALADIUMS. j 
! June 20.—Monochrome Plate of ZENOBIA 
I SPECIOSA PULVERULENTA. 
I July 4.—Coloured Plate of APHELANDRA \ 
AURANTIACA ROEZLII. 
I July 11. — Monochrome Plate of the ( 
AUSTRALIAN PITCHER PLANT. 
August 1.—Coloured Plate of BORONIA \ 
) HETEROPHYLLA. 
' Back numbers may be obtained from the j 
) publishers, price 2-td. post free. 
; With the PRESENT ISSUE we present 
\ a Half-tone Plate of FOSSIL TREES AS ) 
GARDEN ORNAMENTS. 
\ NEXT WEEK we shall give a Half-tons ) 
S Plate of ALLIUM ALBOPILOSUM. ( 
I Views and Reviews. 
Fossil Trees as Garden Orna¬ 
ments. 
Horticulture deals usually with living 
vegetation, and living plants take up so much 
of our attention and time that we seldom 
think of dealing with the vegetation of a 
bygone agei—that is, fossil vegetation re¬ 
presenting the plants which grew upon the 
earth at a period so far distant, that we, in 
common with others, can only guess at it 
vaguely. We may say at the outset that it 
is impossible to give anything more than an 
approximate date, and we can only speak of 
it as geological periods, leaving figures en¬ 
tirely out of the question as mere hazardous 
guesswork. 
The fossil trees to which we intend to refer 
belong to the second, or mesozoic, period of 
the earth’s history, when the formations 
popularly known as limestone®, oolites, and 
chalk were formed. In many respects this 
was an interesting period in the earth’s his¬ 
tory, as in the chalk we have the first 
evidence of Dicotyledonous trees, the earliest 
known of which was described as Populus 
primaieva. 
The fossil trees to which we shall refer on 
this occasion belong to the oolites, and, to 
be specific, the Portland and Purbeck beds. 
The first named will be familiar to many, 
from the use of the term Portland stone, 
which has been quarried from very ancient 
times in the island, or rather the peninsula, 
of Portland in Dorset. This particular form 
of limestone is made up of calcareous matter 
in the form of very small grains, like the 
eggs of insects, and hence described as oolites 
by geologists, from these grains being com¬ 
pared to the eggs of insects, or even those of 
a fish. Where this particular form of lime¬ 
stone is perfectly clean, and forms stone suih 
able for building, we have no fossil plants, 
because the formation was laid down in deep 
sea water by small animalcules then living in 
the sea. . 
The plants proper occur at certain levels 
at a time when we can imagine the bed of 
the sea had been so elevated as to become 
dry land. On this surface the rocks, would 
gradually decay or weather under the action 
of rain, wind, and other atmospheric agen¬ 
cies, such as prevail at the present day, 
except that the climate of this country then 
must have been much warmer than it is at 
the present day, seeing that the plants occur¬ 
ring in a. fossil state can now only be grown 
in hothouses in Britain. 
Although these fossil trees belong to the 
second period of the earth’s history, they do 
not occur at a great depth relatively from 
the surface of the earth, for the simple reason 
that they come to the surface in the Isle of 
Portland and at Purbeck, Swanage. To 
give an idea of the relative position of these 
plants to the earth’s surface, we shall com¬ 
mence at the bottom of a section of the 
strata, and describe the thicknesses of the 
different beds as we progress towards the 
earth’s surface. 
The lower series of beds in these strata 
consist of 80 ft, of Portland sand. Above 
this we have 40 ft, 9 in. of limestone. Above 
this, again, we have 8-J ft, of oolite, followed 
by another bed much about the same in 
character and of the same depth. Then 
follows 31 ft, of oolitic shell-limestone. Over 
all this we have 2J ft., consisting of com¬ 
pact limestone, which had been formed in 
deep water. Above this we come to 4 in. 
of matter termed a “ dirt bed.” This repre¬ 
sents the surface of the earth at that time, 
for the sea bottom had been elevated and 
become dry land. The dirt bed consists of 
sandy, carbonaceous clay, with fragments of 
limestone from the underlying beds. The 
fossil trees grew in this material at a. time 
when Cycads and some of the early Conifers 
constituted the forests covering the whole 
surface of the globe, then above water. 
Although this layer of soil is veiy thin, it un¬ 
doubtedly represents a great number of 
years, in order that these trees may have 
found their way thither, and had time to 
grow and afterwards decay in the situation 
in which they are found. 
Above the dirt, bed just mentioned, we 
have another 9 ft. of compact limestone, re*- 
presenting a period when this part of 
England was once again submerged or sunk 
in deep water. This 9 ft, of limestone must 
