accessible, would be clean felling, followed by replanting as soon as possible, in the same manner as is generally adopted in the south of Japan.
I could not learn the exact range of Cryptomeria as a wild tree,[1] but in the north, where the winter is long and hard, and the snow lies deep for months, it prefers the shady aspect, though it does not attain the same gigantic proportions as it does farther south.
Nikko is approached by a magnificent avenue of Cryptomerias on both sides of the road, 20 miles long, known more or less imperfectly by every visitor to that place, but which can only be properly appreciated by going some way east of Imaichi station, to the point where the trees in good soil attain their greatest dimensions. I took a photographer here specially to take the picture reproduced, and measured the finest trees I could find, of which the tallest was about 145 feet high, and the average 110 to 120 feet, with a girth of 12 to 20 feet on the better soils. Many of the trees have been planted so close together that they have now grown into one tree. The one which I figure (Plate 40) is composed of six stems, which measure 21 feet in greatest diameter, and about 60 in girth. Cf. Sargent, Forest Flora of Japan, p. 75.
The age of these trees, of which many have been blown down by recent gales and some felled, is, as near as I could count the rings of wood, 260 to 270 years, of which over 200 is red wood. The bark is not over ½ to ¾ inch thick, and though some of the trees were beginning to decay at the heart, others were quite sound. The soil is generally a rich black humus overlying a yellow tufaceous volcanic gravel, and the influence of bad soil on the trees is seen very clearly at a point about three miles east of Imaichi, where the road crosses a low ridge of dry and sandy soil, and where they are not more than 80 to 90 feet high by 6 to 8 feet girth.
At the celebrated temples of Nikko there are larger trees than any that I saw in the avenue. The best—shown in Plate 41—is about 150 feet high by 23 feet in girth, but I could not measure the height exactly on account of its position. They are said to be about 300 years old, being probably older than those in the avenue, and seem mostly in perfect health on a slope facing south where the soil is evidently deep and good.
But these magnificent trees are quite eclipsed by those which I saw later at the celebrated monastery town of Koyasan, in the province of Kishu, not nearly so well known to European tourists as it should be. The magnificent cemetery at this place is over a mile long, and planted as an irregular avenue with many lateral annexes—each of which was in the past the private burying ground of great families—with Cryptomeria trees which are said to be 400 years old, and which, I believe, surpass in grandeur any other trees planted by man in the world. They grow at an elevation of about 2800 feet, in a climate which is much milder, and gives evidence of a much heavier rainfall than that at Nikko; for many of the trees had shrubs growing on them as epiphytes on their trunks. In one case a tree of Cupressus obtusa has its stem, 6 to 8 inches thick, completely embedded in the trunk of a sound and
- ↑ In Forestry of Japan, p. 18, it is only said that splendid natural pure woods of it occur in the Nagakizawa State forests in Akita, and in Yakujima in the island of Kyushu, which I had not time to visit, but whether there is any notable difference between the trees in these distinct areas, separated by nearly ten degrees of latitude, is not stated, so far as I can find. According to Shirasawa (loc. cit.) fossil Cryptomeria trees of great dimensions have been found in nearly all parts of Japan.
