tree had been measured twenty years earlier by Washington, when it was nearly the same size. Michaux measured one, 36 miles from Marietta on the road from Wheeling, on the Ohio, 47 feet in girth at 4 feet, which kept the same size for 15 to 20 feet, and then forked into several branches. This tree was hollow.
Ridgway records[1] a tree in Gibson County, Indiana, 160 feet high, 30 feet in girth at the smallest part of the trunk, with a spread of 134 feet by 112 feet; another in Wabash County 168 feet high, 25 feet in girth, and 68 feet to the first branch; another 83½ feet to the first branch, but only 9 feet in girth. He found the prostrate trunk of a tree near Mount Carmel, in Illinois, which was much larger than any of those above mentioned. The decayed base measured 60 feet in circumference; and at 20 feet from the ground, where the tree divided into three large limbs, it was still about 62 feet round. Each of the three limbs was about 70 feet long by 5 feet in diameter, so that the total cubic contents by quarter-girth measurement must have been over 8000 feet. None of these were quite so tall, but much larger in girth than, the largest Tulip tree on record, and I know of no broadleaved tree in the northern hemisphere which equals these dimensions. The largest which I actually saw myself, shown me by Dr. Schneck near Mount Carmel, measured 150 feet by 25 feet, and was standing in a cornfield. In New England it does not attain anything approaching these dimensions, the largest mentioned by Emerson, near Lancaster, Mass., being 18 feet in girth at 6 feet, and holding its size for 20 feet, and with a broad head of great height.
Cultivation
This tree is unsuited to our climate, and though seedlings are frequently raised at Kew, they never live more than a few years, and suffer severely from frosts. One tree raised from Michigan seed attained a height of about 12 feet, but became badly attacked by disease, and was removed about a year ago. So far as we know, there is not a single tree of this species of any size now growing in Britain.
Thomas Rivers, in an interesting article,[2] states that in 1820 there were in his nursery stools of P. occidentalis, which had been planted by his grandfather in 1780. These stools gave shoots with enormous, almost circular slightly-lobed leaves; but the young shoots always died down. From 1830 to 1840 he imported seeds of the American tree, which gave plants like these stools, but never lived for any length of time. He quotes Sir W.J. Hooker's statement: "We often raise young plants of P. occidentalis from American seed; but the annual shoots are killed every winter."[3] Rivers believed that the American plane had never existed in England so as to form large specimens, and that those mentioned as being large trees by Miller in 1759 and by Loudon in 1838 were not the true occidentalis.
The tree is equally rare on the Continent. M. Gadeceau, who wrote two papers[4] on the differences between the occidental and oriental planes, knew of
- ↑ Proc. U.S. Nat. Museum, 1882, p. 288.
- ↑ Gard. Chron. 1856, p. 86, and 1860, p. 47.
- ↑ But this is not always the case, as I planted out two seedlings of P. occidentalis, raised at Kew in the autumn of 1906, and they have remained healthy throughout the cold wet summer of 1907.
- ↑ Bull. Soc. Sc. Nat. Nantes, iv. 105 (1894), and Rev. Hort., 1907, p. 205.
