forest trees, but only attains its full size and perfection in deep rich swamps and river bottoms. I have seen it of immense size in the Lower Wabash Valley in Southern Illinois, where Ridgway measured a tree no less than 164 feet high by 17 feet in girth with a clear stem 80 feet long, and another 137 feet high by 113 feet in girth, which was 94 feet to the first branch. Plate 1444, taken from a photograph for which I am indebted to the U.S. Bureau of Forestry, represents the tree (Example M) mentioned in Proc. U.S. Nat. Mus. v. 67, by Ridgway, which was 124 feet in girth at the base, 78 feet to the first limb, and contained 7888 feet board measure. It grew two miles from Mount Carmel on land now cleared. Such trees, however, are now hardly to be found except in very inaccessible places. On the coast region of North Carolina, Ashe and Pinchot give its dimensions as 100 feet high and 5 or 6 feet in diameter.
The largest that I saw in the Eastern States was a tree in the Clifton Park, near Baltimore, which was 71 feet by 5 feet 9 inches. In New England, near Boston, Sargent says that it suffers from frost in severe winters, and I saw none in cultivation so large as those in England. I found it in a very different and more beautiful form in the mountains near Jalapa, Mexico, at about 4000 feet elevation, where in the month of March in open forests its leaves were conspicuous by their scarlet colour, but the trees were not of extraordinary dimensions. In America it grows mixed with Nyssa, Liriodendron, maples, and oaks. Ashe says that it fruits annually or every other year, but that much of the seed is abortive, and that it springs up commonly on damp hillsides and bottom lands, and also shoots from the stool after the trees have been felled.
History and Cultivation
According to Loudon, this tree was first mentioned by Francis Hernandez, a Spanish naturalist, who published a work on the natural history of Mexico in 1651 at Rome. In 1681 it was sent home by Banister to Bishop Compton, who planted it in the Palace Gardens at Fulham. It had become common in cultivation in Michaux’s time, but he says that even in France it had never produced seed. In Northern Italy it grows well, and I found a good-sized tree on the Isola Madre in Lake Maggiore, which bore seed, from which I have raised plants.
Though this tree will grow to considerable size in the warmest parts of England, and on account of its beautiful autumnal tints is highly ornamental, yet it requires a much greater degree of heat and moisture than our climate affords to bring it to perfection, and has been somewhat neglected by nurserymen on account of its tenderness when young. I have raised it from imported seeds, which do not keep well when extracted from the fruits, but the seedlings grow so slowly that the more common way of raising it is from layers. It does not transplant well, and requires a good deal of moisture in the soil and a warm, sheltered situation. Its branches are easily broken by the wind, and though it does not come early into leaf, is often injured by late frosts.
