as any now in cultivation. Many of the varieties only show their distinctive characteristics when young, and soon grow up into the normal form. Beissner gives as many as forty varieties; but it is doubtful if all these are recognisable. Those commonly met with in cultivation in this country are enumerated below:—
1. Var. ericoides.[1]
- Retinospora dubia, Carrière, Conif. ed. 2, p. 141.
A form in which the seedling foliage is fixed and preserved. It is a dwarf, compact, rounded, or somewhat pyramidal shrub, with slender branchlets, on which the leaves, heath-like in appearance, are borne in distant decussate pairs. They are spreading, linear, and soft in texture, becoming brown in winter. This shrub resembles Cupressus pisifera, var. squarrosa; but in the latter the leaves are much whiter on both surfaces, and do not brown in winter. The latter also attains a much larger size, and often becomes a large shrub or small tree,
2. Var. Ellwangeriana.
- Retinospora Ellwangeriana, Carrière, Rev. Hort. 1869, p. 349.
This is a transition form, in which both kinds of foliage, seedling and adult, appear on the shrub, which may attain a considerable size. There is no regularity in the distribution of the two kinds of leaves; but in shrubs at Kew of this variety the juvenile foliage persists on branchlets in the interior shaded parts, the external branchlets having adult foliage.
It was probably this form which M'Nab[2] mentions as having seen in 1866 in quantity in the nursery of Messrs. P. Lawson and Sons, who had received it from Messrs. Ellwanger and Barry of America under the name of Tom-Thumb Arbor Vitæ. M'Nab states that the heath-like leaves have a slight smell of juniper, while the other foliage has the odour of ordinary Thuya occidentalis.
3. Var. plicata, Masters, Gard. Chron. xxi. 258, fig. 86 (1897).
- Thuya plicata, Parlatore, D.C. Prod. xvi. 457.
A tree differing from the type in the branch-systems tending to assume the vertical plane, being curved so that the ultimate branchlets lie in different planes. The foliage is conspicuously glandular, the lateral leaves being flattened, so that they become almost like the median ones in appearance. According to Kent the foliage shows a brownish tint.
This variety was long considered to be a distinct species; but it is only a seedling of Thuya occidentalis, with which it agrees in cones and in general character of the leaves.
4. Var. Wareana. This only differs from the last in the colour of the foliage, which is a deep green without any brown tinge. It was raised by Mr. Ware of Coventry.[3] According to Masters[4] it has larger leaves than var. plicata, and corresponds very closely with native specimens of Thuya occidentalis gathered at Niagara.
- ↑ A plant of this variety growing into the mature form at Meehan's nursery, Germantown, U.S., showed that it was only a juvenile state of Thuya occidentalis.—Garden and Forest, 1893, p. 378.
- ↑ Trans. Edin. Bot. Soc. ix. 61, fig. (1868).
- ↑ Gordon, Pinetum, ed. 2, p. 409.
- ↑ Gard. Chron. xxi. 258 (1897).
