Page:TheTreesOfGreatBritainAndIreland vol03B.djvu/404

686

Acer Negundo was very early introduced into England, being cultivated in the garden at Fulham by Bishop Compton in 1688. According to Loudon, this tree was about 45 feet high and 7 feet 1 inch in girth in 1835.

It is by far the commonest of American maples in cultivation, the variegated form being grown in every nursery and planted extensively in shrubberies and town gardens for the sake of its colour. It grows from seed with extraordinary rapidity, attaining 5 or 6 feet high in 3 years, is apparently at home in every kind of soil, and resists all the extremes of our climate without injury. Though Loudon says that the seed must be sown in autumn, I have found that it will germinate readily when sown as late as June. Trees which came up in a bed of American ash in my nursery in June 1901, are already 15 feet high, and bearing seed freely when only seven years old.

Though not often seen as a tree, yet on good soil it seems to attain almost as great size in England as in America. Loudon mentions a tree at Kenwood which was 47 feet high, 35 years after being planted. A tree at Botley, Hants, probably planted by Cobbett, was recorded’ in 1884 as being 70 feet high by 6 feet 4 inches, but I did not find this when I visited Botley in 1906. The largest, however, that we have seen is at the Mote, near Maidstone, which I found in 1902 to be 53 feet high by 8 feet 4 inches. Henry measured one at Shiplake House, near Henley, 50 feet by 6 feet 3 inches, with a clean bole 16 feet long; and there is a large wide- spreading tree in Kew Gardens near the Director's Office which is about 4o feet high, and measures 6 feet 8 inches in girth. Another in the Oxford Botanic Garden is 4 feet in girth; and a very old tree, with a short trunk and wide-spreading branches, in Mortlock’s Garden, behind the Corn Exchange at Cambridge, probably on the site of the old Botanic Garden, is about 30 feet in height and 5 feet 8 inches in girth. Miss Woolward, in 1905, measured a tree in the grounds of the Knowle Hotel at Sidmouth, 38 feet in height and 3 feet 10 inches in girth.

Its timber is very unlike that of other maples, for though in young trees it is whitish, the heartwood of old trees is of a most peculiar colour, purplish red with dark veins.? I have never seen it of sufficient size to be useful, though Michaux Says it was in his time sometimes used by cabinetmakers in the west; and Sargent states that it is sometimes used for the interior finish of houses, wooden-ware, cooperage, and paper pulp. Small quantities of maple sugar are occasionally made from this tree.

1 Woods and Forests, 1884, p. 316.

2 I made this note from specimens shown as "Box Elder” at the St. Louis Exhibition, but do not find any confirmation of this in Sargent’s or Hough’s works.