Trees

Trees: A Woodland Notebook, containing observations on certain British and exotic trees, is by Sir Herbert Maxwell. The title page says the book is illustrated with photographs by Mr. Henry Irving and others. A picture caption reads Judas Tree (Cercis siliquastrum) at Twyford Lodge, Winchester.

The text says British oak, though it is under temporary commercial eclipse, can never fail of producing timber of the very highest quality. The text says that if ash be esteemed commercially mature at seventy years, larch and Scots pine at eighty or ninety, oak cannot be reckoned ready for the axe at less age than one hundred and twenty. A section headed The Rowan and its Relatives says there is no group of trees whereof the scientific nomenclature has become so hopelessly confused as the Pomaceæ, a sub-order of the vast rose order. The text says that the largest Wellingtonia measured by the German botanist Mayr, a giant at 13 feet above the ground, was 99 feet in circumference, 11 yards in diameter, and showed 4250 rings of annual growth.