30 feet in height at Berkhampstead, Herts, is mentioned by Webster.’ In the Revue Horticole, 1906, p. 395, f. 157, a curious weeping Wellingtonia, growing at the Trianon, is figured. The stem, which is 42 feet in length, bends over and is supported on one side by a prop. Barron also obtained a weeping form, which was sold as S. gigantea Barroni pendula.
2. Var. aurea (var. aureo-variegata), The young shoots are amber-coloured at first, but speedily become deep yellow, the colour being pretty uniform over the whole tree. The original plant was a seedling, which Hartland* of the Lough Nurseries, Cork, received in 1856. It began to show colour when it was about a foot high, and after it had attained 8 feet, a large number of golden Wellingtonias were propagated from it by grafting. A specimen 20 feet high was growing * in the public garden at Denbigh in 1887. We have seen no trees of this variety of a considerable size.
3. Several other varieties, which I have not seen, are mentioned by Beissner °® as glauca, argentea, Holmsii, and pygmea. (A.H.)
Distribution
Wellingtonia has a restricted distribution, being confined to the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada of California, in an interrupted belt at elevations of from 5000 to 8400 feet above sea-level, extending from the middle fork of the American River (lat. 39°) to the head of Deer Creek, just south of lat. 36°.
Iam indebted to Mr. Gifford Pinchot for the most recent account which has been officially published of the big trees of California,’ illustrated by some excellent photographs ; from which it appears that John Bidwell in 1841 was really the first to discover this tree in the Calaveras Grove, Prof. Brewer of Yale having been the first scientific visitor in 1864 to this and the Mariposa Grove. Mr. Whitney, in the Yosemite Guide Book (1870) described eight of the then known groves, namely :—
1. The North Grove in Placer county is on a tributary of the middle fork of the
1 Hardy Coniferous Trees, 113 (1896).
2 Another weeping form is said to have originated in Little and Ballantyne’s nursery at Carlisle; but the original tree died in 1877. Cf. Journal of Forestry, iii. 260 (1879).
3 Letter to Kew.
4 Gard. Chron. ii. 276 (1887).
5 Nadelholzkunde, 165 (1891).
6 A "Report on the Stanislaus and Lake Tahoe Forest Reserves, by G. B. Sudworth,” Bulletin No. 28; U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Division of Forestry, published at Washington in 1900, which gives the following table of measurements of thirty of the big trees in the Calaveras Grove :—
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