Distribution
The oriental plane has been in cultivation from very early times in the Mediterranean region ; and the limits of its distribution in the wild state are difficult to determine accurately.
It occurs wild in woods and along torrents in the mountainous regions of Albania and Greece. It grows in chestnut groves and in mountain forests from sea-level to 2500 feet elevation in Macedonia, Thrace, and Bithynia. It is undoubtedly indigenous in the mountains of Crete, Cyprus, and Rhodes; and in Western and Southern Asia Minor up to 5000 feet, not ascending into the zone of the cedars, and also occurs in the Lebanon. M. Gadeceau, in Rev. Hort. 1907, p. 207, quotes a letter from a correspondent in Syria to the effect that the plane, known to the Arabs as Dolbe, does not grow in the forests, but only in valleys and along the banks of rivers; on Mt. Hermon it reaches 4000 to 5000 feet elevation.
Its occurrence in the wild state elsewhere is very doubtful, as all the specimens which I have seen from other localities were collected near villages. The great plane trees described by travellers as occurring in Persia, Afghanistan, Kashmir, etc., are evidently planted.
Radde,’ who paid particular attention to the subject, denies its occurrence in the wild state in the Caucasus. Dr. Stapf only saw it cultivated in Persia, where it always grows near villages. In Afghanistan, according to Aitchison,’ it is certainly not indigenous; but he found it naturalised in one district, where it had been originally planted in a valley and was gradually taking possession of the adjoining hill. According to Brandis,’ it is cultivated in the North-West Himalaya, particularly in the Kashmir valley, east of the Bias and Sutlej, ascending to 8300 feet in Western Ladak. It grows well at Peshawar; and attains 75 feet in height in Kashmir and Chamba, the largest girth noted by Dr. Stewart at Srinagar being 28 feet. The Nasim Bagh, on the border of the great Kashmir lake, is a large grove planted by Akbar the Great, soon after he had taken Kashmir in 1588. Originally this grove contained 1200 trees, a large proportion of which are still standing. In 1838 Vigne found the average girth to be 13 feet, some of the trees growing near water being as large as 20 feet.
Tchihatcheff states that in Cyprus and Zante it is evergreen ; but this statement is not confirmed by other travellers, although occasionally an evergreen variety occurs, as in the case of a tree at Lutraki in Crete, which was mentioned by Admiral Spratt. Mr. Sandwith wrote to Kew in 1884 that this tree had been cut down several years before, but that several vigorous shoots were springing from
1 Pflanzenverb. Kaukasusländ. 170, 187, 189 (1899).
2 Journ. Linn. Soc. (Bot.) xviii. 94 (1881).
3 Forest Flora N.W. India, 434 (1874).
4 Travels and Researches in Crete, ii. 40. Pliny mentioned the existence of an extraordinary evergreen plane tree which grew on the banks of the Lethæus. Tournefort searched for it without success ; but its existence was make known to Captain Spratt by Mr. Agnew, an English merchant who owned property at Lutraki, where he showed him two young and branching plane trees growing by a rivulet, which retained their leaves all the winter. Mr. Agnew said that these were suckers from the roots of a very large tree of the same kind, which he had cut down, without knowing its rarity ; and Spratt adds that he heard of two others growing near the village of Vourvalete on the banks of the Platanos river in the west of Crete. Spratt speaks, op. cit. p. 191, of a grove of large and beautiful plane trees, mixed with elm and oak, and covered with wild vines which climb to their very top.—(H.J.E.)
