County, the seat of the Earl of Portarlington, there are about twenty fine trees in the pleasure ground, one of which measured in 1907 105 feet by 7 feet 9 inches, another being 92 by 10 feet.
Larch in the Alps
In its native home the larch loves a dry cold winter climate, where the snow lies from December to April or May, and at the higher elevations does not begin to vegetate before the end of the latter month. It is not very particular as to the geological character of the soil provided that the rock is sufficiently disintegrated for the roots to penetrate and there is a fair amount of soil in which the seeds can germinate, and as a rule natural reproduction is fairly regular and abundant. It is not often allowed to attain its full age, which may be 150 to 300 years or more, on account of the value of its timber for building and other purposes.
As to the size it attains in its native home I have few exact particulars. The largest that I have measured myself was near Modane, in the forest de Villarodin, at 4500 feet elevation, growing on schist with a north aspect. This tree, said to be the largest in the district, was about 90 feet high by 16 feet in girth, but tapered rapidly, and would not contain more than about 200 feet of timber.
By far the finest specimen of the larch in the Alps is figured in Plate 105, made from a negative which was very kindly lent me by M. Coaz, Chief Forest Inspector of the Swiss Forest Department, and which is described in Les Arbres de la Suisse[1] as follows:—
"The larch of Blitzlingen grows opposite the little village of this name in the district of Conches in the upper Valais at an elevation of 1350 metres. At the foot of a slope facing north-west, on a narrow terrace this tree grows in a deep and fresh loam, rich in humus, and overlying gneiss rock. There it has become one of the largest in Switzerland, and measures at its base 8 metres 70 cent., and at 1½ metre is still 7½ metres in girth. Its branches extend 1o metres from the trunk. Its top is dead, and thus it is only 29 metres high. Strongly attacked by decay, its trunk does not allow its age to be exactly determined, but no one can accuse us of exaggeration if we estimate it at about five centuries."
According to Dr. L. Klein, who gives an excellent account of the larch,[2] it sometimes attains in the Alps an age of 600 to 700 years. Some stumps which he saw in the so-called Park of Saas-Fee, in the canton of Valais, showed that number of rings, but these trees did not exceed from 1 to 1½ metre in diameter. Dr, Klein counted on a sawn stump near the Findelen glacier 417 annual rings in a diameter of 85 centimetres. He gives several excellent illustrations of Alpine larches taken near the Riffel Alp, one of which shows a tree forking close to the ground into four stems, and another a so-called Candelabra larch with branches rising parallel to the main stem.
