tree of Japan, as it is also the largest, and though it is now difficult to say how far its natural distribution extends, it has been planted everywhere from such a remote period, and grows so rapidly that it is now the most conspicuous tree in all those parts of Japan which I visited except in the island of Hokkaido.[1]
I saw it wild in the primeval forests which cover the mountains on the frontier of the provinces of Akita and Aomori in the extreme north, near a station called Jimba, at an elevation of about 1000 feet, where the lower edge of the forests and more accessible valleys have already been denuded of their best timber. The Japanese Government have lately made a good road up one of the valleys, which enabled me to see the forest at its best under the guidance of their obliging foresters. The hills are here very steep, often with a slope of 30° to 40°, and covered on the north-east aspects with an almost pure growth of Cryptomeria, and though on the south-west aspects a few deciduous trees, such as maple, magnolia, oak, chestnut, and Æsculus were mixed with it, I saw no other conifer. This forest is not truly virgin, because from time to time trees have been cut for shingles and tub staves, which are made in the forest and carried out on men's backs as usual in the remoter parts of Japan. But in many places it was quite dense, and the undergrowth consisted largely of ferns, Aucuba, Skimmia, Hydrangea, and a variety of other shrubs, and tall, rank-growing herbaceous plants such as Spiræa and Rodgersia podophylla.
The trees average in size 100 to 110 feet high by 2 to 3 feet in diameter, and are clean for half their length or more, in the denser parts of the forest. The largest trees which have been felled here do not exceed about 100 feet in timber length and about 4 feet diameter. The rings of one of 5 feet in girth which I measured showed 116 years' growth, of which about 87 were red heart-wood. Another close by was very flat-sided, measuring 3 feet 9 inches in diameter one way, and only 2 feet 9 inches the other, the centre on that side being only 1 foot from the nearest point of the bark. This tree was about 136 years old, over 100 years growth being red heart-wood.
Many trees were more or less curved at the butt, and many others forked low down into two, three, or more stems. There were plenty of cones on the trees which had sufficient light, but a careful search did not discover a single self-sown seedling, all the young trees which were coming up—and those not numerous—being evidently suckers or growths from the stool. The dense layer of coarse, sour humus and half-decayed leaves and branches form a bed in which the seedling after germination cannot take root, but on the railway banks and other exposed surfaces not overgrown by dense grass young seedlings appeared and grew freely. Many of these trees had large climbers, such as Vitis Coignetiæ, Schizophragma, and Wistaria, growing nearly to their tops. Plate 38, taken from a negative kindly given me by the Japanese Imperial Forest Department, shows the appearance of this forest. Plate 39 a, from the same source, shows a mature forest of Cryptomeria in the island of Shikoku. Plate 39 b shows the trunk of the tree and the manner of felling still adopted in Japan, cf. p. 137.
The forester told me that the system adopted in this forest, now that it is
- ↑ Mayr quotes Dr. Honda for the fact that the most southern locality where it grows wild is in the island of Yakushima, the northernmost of the Riu-Kiu islands, where in a dense forest at a high elevation it forms immense trunks.
