Page:TheTreesOfGreatBritainAndIreland vol01.djvu/204

176 actual girth at 5 feet from the ground, following all sinuosities, was 146 feet, the longest diameter being 42 feet. The cypress of Montezuma, which is the largest of the great trees in the gardens of Chapultepec, near Mexico, is about 48 feet in girth, according to Elwes, who saw it in 1888. Its height is about 170 feet.

Taxodium mucronatum was first described from a specimen growing in the Botanic Garden at Naples, said to have been introduced into Europe in 1838. Elwes saw this tree in April 1903, when the old leaves were partly persistent. A tree at Palermo has borne fruit. There are specimens at Kew labelled "Hort. Cusinati," collected by J. Ball, which bear very large cones, 1½ inches long by an inch in breadth.

Two seedlings were raised by Elwes from seeds brought by Mr. Marlborough Pryor from Oaxaca in 1904, one of which is to be planted out in a sheltered dell at Tregothnan in Cornwall, the other in the Temperate House at Kew. The larger of these, which grew slowly in a greenhouse through the winter of 1904–5, was about 18 inches high at one year old.

The typical form is the one commonly cultivated in England. In summer the foliage is decidedly ornamental, being of a delicate green colour. In autumn the leaves, before they fall, become reddish brown in colour.

Sub-varieties.—About a dozen sub-varieties are enumerated by Beissner, pyramidal, pendulous, fastigiate, dwarf forms, etc. The tree is very variable in habit.

Taxodium distichum rarely produces flowers or fruit in England. It first bore fruit about the year 1752. A tree at Ryton-on-Dunsmore, which was forty years old, produced flowers, apparently all males and in great abundance, in 1868. Fruiting specimens were sent to Dr. Masters from Menabilly in Cornwall in 1893; the cones were smaller than native-grown ones. One of these was proliferous, the cone terminating in a branch bearing leaves and male flowers; and from the sides of the cone leaf-bearing branches also emerged, which on examination proved to form no part of either bract or scale, but were separate outgrowths from the axis of the cone. On a tree at Gwydyr Castle, North Wales, fruit is borne about every third year, but Mr. Macintyre informed me that it never was fully matured, and no seedlings were ever raised. According to Webster, this tree was profusely covered with cones in 1884, but had none when Elwes saw it in 1906. Bunbury states that at Abergwynant, in Wales, a tree produced oval cones.

Gay says that though often cultivated in wet places in several old parks at Paris, he has only seen fruit at the Trianon on a tree growing in very dry ground.