uninjured by the severe spring frost of May 21–23, 1905, and ripened their young wood well in October. They,may be distinguished by the larger leaves with a pair of persistent linear stipules at the base.
Remarkable Trees
From the dimensions given by foreign authors I doubt whether in its native country the Hop Hornbeam ever attains a much larger size than the one which I figure (Plate 153). This remarkable tree is at Langley Park, near Norwich, the seat of Sir Reginald Beauchamp, and cannot be of great age, as it is not mentioned in an account of this place in Grigor's Eastern Arboretum, published in 1841. It is grafted on a stock of the hornbeam which measures 8 feet in girth below the graft, while the trunk above it is no less than 15 feet 8 inches. Its height is difficult to estimate, but may be about 50 feet.
A large tree formerly grew at Kew, on which Mr. J.G. Jack, in Garden and Forest, v. 602, remarks as follows:—"An unusually fine specimen of a hop hornbeam, 50 feet high, branching near the ground and spreading about 70 feet, with a trunk over 3 feet in diameter, was grafted on a stock of hornbeam at 23 feet from the ground, and is a good deal larger than its stock, with a swelling at the point of juncture. No one can help remarking the striking contrast between the rough bark of the Ostrya and the comparatively smooth bark of the Carpinus."
This tree was perhaps the one figured by Loudon[1] in 1838, which was then said to be 60 feet high, with a trunk 3 feet in diameter, and the finest specimen in England at that time. In 1890 it was figured in the Gardeners' Chronicle[2] as a handsome wide-spreading tree, but soon after began to decay, and was cut down in 1897,[3] when it measured 59 feet high by 9 feet 4 inches in girth at 3 feet. Fruit was abundantly produced; but no perfect seeds were ever developed. A part of its trunk is preserved in the Museum at Kew, and I am indebted to the Director for a sample of the timber, which somewhat resembles that of the pear. According to Mouillefert it has all the qualities of hornbeam wood in a superior degree.
There is a fine specimen in the Botanic Garden at Oxford, which measures about 40 feet by 4 feet. This tree, though quite healthy, is much infested by mistletoe. At Tortworth there is a tree about 4o feet high by 2 feet 7 inches in girth, At Munden; Watford, a tree, 32 feet by 2 feet 11 inches, is said to have been planted about 1830.
In Scotland we know of no tree of this species of large size now existing, though a large one formerly grew at Bargally,[4] a place between Gatehouse and Newton-Stewart, once the property of Andrew Heron, a celebrated planter, who died in 1729. Loudon went there in 1831, and gives the dimensions[5] of the Ostrya
- ↑ Op. cit. viii. 244 a.
- ↑ Gard. Chron. viii. 275, Fig. 47 (1890). Also figured in Woods and Forests, 1884, p. 318. The shapes of the trees figured in Loudon and in the Gardeners' Chronicle are very different.
- ↑ Kew Bull. 1897, p. 404.
- ↑ Walker, Essays on Natural History and Rural Economy (1812).
- ↑ Bargally is fully described by Loudon, op. cit. i. 95–99 (1838).
