large trees; while in the case of trees growing at high altitudes they are sometimes spread over the whole of the branches.
Male flowers, 1⁄16, inch long, with rounded connectives. Female flowers with about twenty broadly ovate bracts, tipped usually with short points. Cones ellipsoidal, 3⁄4 to 1 inch long, 1⁄2 inch broad; scales with slender stalks, which enlarge abruptly into discs 1⁄3 inch in breadth. Seeds light brown, 1⁄16 inch long; wings narrower than in S. gigantea.
The cones ripen at the end of the first season, and are freely produced in most parts of the South of England and in Ireland, the first recorded[1] being in 1862 on a tree at Barton, Suffolk, which had been planted in 1847. Fertile seed, however, is very rare, the only instance known to us being on a large tree at Huntley Manor, Gloucestershire, from which Prof. Somerville raised seedlings in 1904. Proliferous cones[2] occur occasionally; and a cone[3] with the upper part ovulate and the lower part staminate has been observed.
The tree suckers from the root,[4] and sends up, when cut, numerous shoots[5] from the stool. Fasciation[6] has been observed in the suckers in the redwood forest in California. Dr. Masters[7] described and figured the peculiar woody excrescences, which are sometimes formed at the base of the stem of young trees, which have been raised from cuttings.
Varieties
In the wild state there is some variation, as noticed above, in the occasional occurrence of lateral branches with foliage like that of the leading shoots. Several varieties have been obtained in cultivation:—
1. Var. albospica (var. adpressa). Tips of young shoots creamy white in colour. Leaves small and dense upon the twigs, resembling those of Taxus baccata adpressa.
2. Var. glauca. Leaves linear, acute, 1⁄4 inch long, glaucous, loosely imbricated, appressed or spreading.
3. Var. taxifolia. Leaves broader than in the type.
A tree, pendulous in habit, is growing at Dropmore.
Distribution
The redwood occurs on the western slopes, valleys, and alluvial flats of the coast range, from the Chetco river in Oregon to Salmon Creek Caijion, twelve miles south of Punta Gorda in Monterey county, California, and ascends from sea-level to 2000 or rarely 3000 feet. It occupies a narrow strip of country along the sea coast, about 500 miles in length from north to south, and is not found inland beyond
- ↑ Bunbury, Arboretum Notes, 166 (1889).
- ↑ Proc. Calif. Acad. Sc. v. 170, t. 16, f. 3 (1895).
- ↑ Bot. Gazette, xxviii. 2 (1904).
- ↑ Two suckers are growing beside a tree, 60 feet high, at Shiplake House, near Henley.
- ↑ In Journ. Roy. Hort. Soc. xix. 432 (1896), it is stated that redwood coppice shoots are believed to have been used for producing hop-poles in Kent; but this must have been an experiment on a small scale, and without any practical value. At Arley, shoots from the stool of a tree, which was felled, made a growth of 4 feet in their first year.
- ↑ Pierce, in Proc. Calif. Acad. Sc. ii. 83 (1901), who also gives an account of peculiar white-coloured suckers, which are often seen in California.
- ↑ Gard. Chron. xi. 372, fig. 53 (1879).
