There is a handsome tree on the lawn at Belton Park, which measures 41 feet by 6 feet 7 inches.
A very spreading, ill-shaped tree in a thicket at Mount Meadow, near Cobham, Kent, is 9 feet 3 inches in girth.
At Stowe, near Buckingham, there are several fine trees near the Queen's Temple, which are about 50 feet high, but the tree when growing wild on the Cotswold Hills, where it is common, rarely exceeds 30 feet with a stem 2 to 3 feet in girth, and is more usually seen as a bush with many stems.
The whitebeam, like the mountain ash, is occasionally found as an epiphyte growing on other trees, where its seeds have been dropped by birds. Though this is more common in the damp climate of the west of England, yet we know of two cases which are remarkable on account of their situation. One is in the Yew Tree Vale in Surrey, where a whitebeam is growing near the top of a yew tree;[1] the other is near Colesborne in the Cotswold Hills. In this case a large limb has been torn by the wind from a Scots pine, and in the crevice on the east side of the tree, where but very little vegetable matter has yet had time to form, a healthy young whitebeam, now about 3 feet high, grew for seven or eight years, when it began to lose vigour.
Though it is well known that the decaying mossy trunk of a fallen tree is one of the most favourable situations for the seeds of many conifers to germinate and grow, yet in this case the roots of the whitebeam must derive their nourishment almost entirely from the air, the case being very different from those so often seen in the Himalayas and other countries, where a large quantity of moss, ferns, and decaying vegetable matter accumulate in the forks of large old trees.
The whitebeam is easily propagated by seed, which, if sown in autumn, will germinate partly in the following spring and partly in the second year after sowing. The seedlings grow slowly at first, and require five or six years in the nursery before they are large enough to plant out. When planted on good soil the whitebeam is a very ornamental tree, both on account of its leaves and fruit, which is larger and more abundant than when wild. It is, however, so much liked by birds that it is soon eaten up.
Timber
The wood is hard, heavy, and even in the grain, and is white in colour, with some dark spots, and in old trees becomes occasionally tinged with red. It is used on the Continent in turnery and in making tools.
Loudon says that it was used for the axletrees, naves, and felloes of wheels, carpenters' tools, and walking-sticks, but that the greatest use of its wood, until iron superseded it, was for the cogs of small wheels. I have felled a tree 18 inches in diameter, which when cut through was perfectly sound at heart, and was considered to be well suited for chair-making.
- ↑ Garden, 1882, xxii. 164.
