and spreading from beyond the middle, rigid, ending in sharp cartilaginous points ; lower surface green, rounded or keeled; upper surface with green midrib and two inconspicuous bands of stomata.
Staminate flowers, 1⁄6 to 1⁄3 inch long, with acute or acuminate connective
Pistillate flowers with twenty-five to forty pale yellow bracts gradually narrowed into long slender points. Cones ripening in the second year, ovoid-oblong, 2 to 3 inches long by 11⁄2 to 2 inches wide, brownish; scales gradually thickening from the base to the dilated disc, which is 3⁄4 to 1 inch broad, and often bears a reflexed spine in the centre of the transverse depression. Seeds, 1⁄8 to 1⁄4 inch long, light-brown, apiculate at the apex, surrounded by laterally united, often unequal wings, which are broader than the body of the seed. Proliferous cones have been observed.’
Wellingtonia produces cones freely in many parts of the British Isles, but these are smaller in size as a rule than those of the wild tree and rarely contain mature seed. Mr. Richards informed me that he had sown a large quantity of seed, produced by a tree growing at Penrhyn on the lawn in an isolated sunny position, and only obtained eight seedlings. Barnes” raised young plants from seeds produced by a tree at Bicton. At Orton Longueville, Mr. Harding * succeeded in raising six seedlings out of 100 seeds. The tree cones well at Dropmore, but has seldom if ever produced fertile seed there.
Wellingtonia differs markedly from the redwood, in not reproducing itself either by suckers from the root or by coppice shoots. In its native forests, seed ts produced in great abundance, and numerous seedlings occur everywhere in the southern part of the area of distribution of the species; but in the northern groves seedlings are said to be totally wanting.
Varieties
None have been noticed in the wild state. Several have appeared in cultivation in Europe.
1. Var. pendula. Branches bent downwards at the base, and hanging for their whole length close to the stem, forming in young plants a slender pyramid and in older examples a tall narrow column. This remarkable variety was obtained out of the seed-bed by Lalande of Nantes in 1863, and was put upon the market in 1873 by Paillet of Chatenay-les-Sceaux, near Paris. The best tree‘ of this kind is growing at M. Allard’s arboretum at Angers, in France, and when measured by Elwes in 1907 was 44 feet high by 3 feet in girth, but only 13 feet round the branches. At Bicton,® this variety is represented by a tree which in 1902 was 33 feet high by 26 inches in girth at 2 feet from the ground. At Brettargh Holt,’ Kendal, the residence of Charles Walker, Esq., a weeping Wellingtonia was reported to be 22 feet high in the same year. Another example, aged 26 years, growing at Dalkeith Palace and reported to be 191⁄2 feet high in 1902, was figured in the Gardeners’ Chronicle® A specimen
1 Carrière, Rev. Hort. 1887, p. 509, f. 103. Cf. Gard. Chron. ii. 649 (1887).
2 Gard. Chron, 1868, p. 872.
3 Ibid. xxix. 55 (1901).
4 Described and figured by Rehder in Möller’s Deutsche Gärtner Zeitung, March 22, 1902.
5 Gard. Chron. xxxi. p. 388, fig. 136, and p. 435; and xxxii. p. 23 (1902).
