the trees of great britain & ireland - Facsimile Books & other digitally ...

184 The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland
THUYA PLICATA, GIANT THUYA
Tlutyaplicata, D . Don in Lambert, Pinus, ed. i, ii. 19 (1824); Masters, Card. Chron. xxi. 214;
figs. 69, 70, 71 (1897); Sudworth, Check List Forest Trees U.S. 3 1 (1898); Sargent, Manual
Trees JV. America, 7 5 (1905).
Tlutya gigantea, Nuttall, Jour. Philad. A fad. vii. 52 (1834); Sargent, Silva N. America, x. 129, t.
533 (1896); Kent, in Veitch's Man. Coniferie, 2 39 (1900).
Thuya Menziesii, Douglas, ex Carriere, Traitc Gen. Conif. 1 07 (1867).
Thuya Lobbi, Hort.
Thuya Craigiana, Hort. \non A. Murray, Bot. Exped. Oregon, z ( 1853)].
A lofty tree, attaining a height of 200 feet, with a trunk remarkably conical, the
base being broad and buttressed, sometimes girthing as much as 40 to 50 feet near
the ground.
Bark of the trunk fissuring longitudinally in narrow thick plates, which scale off,
leaving exposed the reddish brown cortex beneath. On the branches, the bark only
begins to scale when they become old and thick. Branches horizontal, ascending
towards their ends, forming in England a dense, narrow, pyramidal tree, usually
clothed to the base.
The 3-4 pinnate branch-systems, disposed in horizontal planes, have their main
axes terete and covered with long leaves ending in acute points which keep parallel to
the axes. The glands on these leaves are inconspicuous or absent. On the ultimate
axes the leaves are smaller, the flat ones scarcely glandular, and ending in mucronate
points; the lateral ones keeled on the back, slightly curved, and ending in sharp
cartilaginous points. On the lower surface of most branchlets the foliage is streaked
with white, some branchlets usually remaining uniformly green.
The male flowers are dark red in colour, cylindrical, and composed of about
6 decussate pairs of stamens.
The cones when ripe do not remain erect, but are deflected out of the plane
of the branchlets. They are oblong, light brown in colour, and composed of 5 to 6
pairs of scales, of which the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th pairs are larger than the others, and
fertile. The scales are oval or spathulate, with a rounded apex, from immediately
below which externally a small deltoid process is given off. The seeds, 2 or 3 on
each fertile scale, are brown in colour, two-thirds the length of the scale, and
surrounded laterally by a scarious wing, which is deeply notched at its summit.
Seedling. 1—The 2 cotyledons are linear, flat, acute at the apex, and slightly
tapering towards the base, supported on a terete caulicle, about J inch long, which
ends in a long brown flexuose primary root giving off a few fibres. The stem, terete
and smooth near the base, becomes ridged above by the decurrent leaf-bases. The
first 4 true leaves are in opposite pairs, decussate with the cotyledons. Above
these the stem gives off a number of whorls or pseudo-whorls of longer (1 inch)
sharply pointed leaves, dark green above and pale beneath, with markedly decurrent
1 Figured in Lubbock, Seedlings, ii. 551, hg. 676 (1892), and Sargent, lee. cil. t. 533, fig. 1 2.
Thuyi
bases. After a few of these whorls lateral branches are given off, which sometimes
bear a few acicular leaves at their bases. The lateral branches ramify and approach
in character those of the adult plant, as the leaves are arranged decussately in 4
ranks. These leaves are variable, being acicular and loosely imbricated, or scale-like
and closely imbricate. The branches are ascending, horizontal, or drooping, and are
more or less flattened from above downwards.
HISTORY 1
This tree was discovered by Nee, who accompanied Malaspina in his voyage round
the world during the years 1789 to 1794; and his specimen, gathered at Nootka
Sound, is preserved in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington. It was
referred to by James Donn, in Hortus Cantab, ed. 4 (1807), as Thuya plicata, without
any description; and subsequently D. Don drew up from it the oldest description of
the species under the same name. The Thuya plicata of gardens, which was early
in cultivation, is a variety of Thuya occidentalis, and has no connection with the
plant of Nee.
Archibald Menzies, who accompanied Vancouver's expedition as botanist,
gathered specimens also at Nootka Sound in 1795. Nuttall received specimens
later from the Flathead river, on which he founded his description of the species as
Thuya gigantea. It was introduced into cultivation 2 in 1853 by W. Lobb, and
distributed from Veitch's nursery at Exeter as Thuya Lobbi, as at that time Nuttall's
name Thuya gigantea was wrongly applied to Libocedrus decurrens, and Don's name,
Thuya plicata, in a similar erroneous way, had gone into common use for a variety
of Thuya occidentalis. Afterwards the tree became generally known in England as
Thuya gigantea; and it is unfortunate that Don's name, Thuya plicata, must,
following the law of priority, be substituted for a name so well known and so
established as gigantea. This change of name has, however, been adopted in the
Kew Hand List of Conifers, and by Sudworth and Sargent in North America,
and on the whole it is now most convenient to adopt the name Thuya plicata.
(A. H.)
DISTRIBUTION
This tree is, next to the Douglas fir, the most important from an economic point
of view in northern Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.
It extends in the north as far as southern Alaska, in the east to the Cceur
d'Alene Mountains in Idaho and to north-western Montana, and in the south to
Mendocino County in northern California. It is known as Cedar, or Red Cedar, and
is found most abundantly on wet soils and in wet climates, ascending from sea level
to an elevation, according to Sargent, of 6000 feet, where it becomes a low shrub.
1 See Masters, in Card. Chron. Inc. cit.
2 At the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, there were in 1884 five trees of supposed Thuya gigantea, which were
raised, it was said, from seed sent to Edinburgh by Jeffrey in 1851, while collecting for the Oregon Association. Three of
these trees, according to Nicholson, were true giganlea, the other two being what is now known as Thuya occidentalis, var.
plicata. See Woods and forests, Feb. 27, and Mar. 19, 1884. These trees cannot now be identified.
I 2 B