It is scarce in the dry belt of country east of the Cascade Mountains, but common in the Selkirk and Gold ranges, though, so far as I know, it never extends to the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains.
On the coast and in Vancouver Island it attains an immense size. I have never measured trees more than 200 to 220 feet high, but Prof Sheldon says that it attains 250 feet in Oregon, though no actual measurements are given.[1] As regards their girth, I have measured two trees which may have grown from the same root, so close do they stand together, one of which was 39, the other 25 feet at 5 feet from the ground. These stand on Mr. Barkley's farm in Vancouver Island, in swampy land near sea level, and are figured in Plate 56.[2] At over 2000 feet elevation in Oregon I measured another, also a twin tree, which was 30 feet in girth. Mr. Anderson states that he has seen Indian canoes 6 feet and more from the level of the gunwale to the bottom, hewn out of a log of this tree, such canoes being often 50 feet and more long, A hewn plank 5 feet wide by 15 feet long is in the museum at Victoria, B.C., and split boards, quite straight, 12 feet long and 15 inches wide, are made from it without difficulty.
The natural reproduction by seed was, wherever I saw it, very good, though in the densest shade the western hemlock seemed to have the advantage.
Cultivation
Wherever I have seen this tree growing in England and Scotland it is a vigorous, healthy tree of great beauty and promise, and one that I think is likely in fifty years or so to become a more valuable timber tree than the silver fir or spruce.
It has been stated in a report by Herr Bohm, in the March number of the Zeitschrift für Forst. u. Jagdweser for 1896,[3] that the parasitic fungus Pestalozzia funerea has done serious damage to the tree in North Germany, and statements to the same effect have been made elsewhere; but I can say that out of the thousands of this tree that I have raised from English seed and planted out in a bad soil and climate, I have never had any die from any disease whatever, and have found it an easier tree both to raise and to transplant than any other conifer. It will grow on almost any soil at the rate of at least one foot per annum, as in damp, cold bottoms where the spruce will hardly thrive, on the poor dry oolite soil of the Cotswold hills, and seems equally indifferent to wind, damp, and spring frosts.[4] It seldom loses its leader, is rarely blown down, endures heavy shade, and transplants both in
- ↑ In the Canadian Court of the Colonial Exhibition of 1886, there was shown a portion of a bole of this species, which was taken from a tree girthing 21 feet, and having a length of 250 feet. It came from British Columbia.—Gard. Chron. 1886, xxvi. 207.
- ↑ An illustration of a tree growing near Snoqualmie Falls on the Seattle and International Railway, Washington, was given in The Pacific Rural Press in 1897. This is said to have been 107 feet 7 inches round at the base, and was supposed to have been over 1000 years old, but we know of no good evidence that it ever attains so great an age as this.
- ↑ Cf. A.C. Forbes, Gard. Chron. 1896, xix. 554.
- ↑ The very severe frost on May 20–21, 1905, when 10°–15° of frost were registered in many places, which killed many young beech trees in low situations at Colesborne, and checked the young growth considerably, killed none except a few of the weakest Thuyas which were freshly transplanted; but the autumn frost of the following October, when the trees were still in growth, seems to have done more harm, though the young trees did not die till the following spring.
