easily, the seedlings being hardy and fast growing and bearing shade well. In appearance the Zelkova is not an ungraceful tree, resembling a beech perhaps more than an elm, but its small leaves make it a poor shade tree, and its habit of growth varies very much according to the situation in which it grows.
Cultivation
This species was introduced into cultivation in England by J. Gould Veitch,’ who sent seeds from Japan in 1862. It was apparently introduced on the Continent a few years earlier by Siebold; and Koch, writing in 1872, mentions that it had been cultivated previously for several years in the Botanic Garden at Berlin, where it had sustained severe frost without injury.
I raised a quantity of seedlings in 1901 from Japanese seed, which grew rapidly at first, and seemed quite hardy; but those which I have planted out grow slowly, and, where not protected from spring frost, have been killed back every winter, so that they produce bushy shrubs. I should, therefore, suppose that it requires more summer heat and moisture than most parts of England afford, and that it should be planted only in rich, deep soil, where it can be shaded and drawn up by other trees. Careful pruning is also evidently necessary to check its tendency to produce lateral branches when young, and I do not anticipate that it will ever attain large dimensions in Great Britain or be worth planting for its timber.
So far as we have ascertained there are no large trees existing in England, the best specimens we have seen at Kew Gardens, at Tortworth, and in Lord Kesteven’s woods at Casewick, Lincolnshire, not exceeding 20 to 30 feet in height.
Mr. C. Palmer tells me that in November 1864, he planted a specimen received from Veitch, then 3 feet high, in an exposed situation, at about 500 feet above the sea, near Stukeley Grange, Leighton Buzzard. This tree in 1874 was 18½ feet high by 6 inches only in girth. In 1892 it had increased to 2 feet in girth.
A good-sized and healthy-looking tree, of whose age no record can be found, grows near the pond below the entrance from Woburn village to Woburn Park on the right-hand side of the drive.
At Kilmacurragh, Co. Wicklow, a healthy tree measured, in 1904, 41 feet in height and 3 feet 1 inch in girth.
The oldest and largest tree of this species that we know of in Europe is growing in the Botanic Gardens at Carlsruhe. I am indebted to Herr Max Leichtlin, of Baden-Baden, for a photograph of this tree (Plate 250), and Herr Grabener has also sent us one. He informs us that it is one of three seedlings which was raised at St. Petersburg (or brought from Leyden). It was planted sometime between 1859 and 1861, and has never suffered from frost, having sustained the severe winter of 1879–1880 without injury.? In 1904 it measured at 1½ metre from the ground 3.10 metres in girth.
1 Hortus Veitchii, 386 (1906). Mr. H.J. Veitch informs me that the plants raised at Coombe Wood only attained 3 to 4 feet in height, and gradually died out, the whole being finally lost during a severe winter.
2 Mayr says that at Grafrath it has endured - 25° Cent. without injury.
