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120 to 200 feet high, free from branches up to 80 to 120 feet, and as much as 6 to 8 feet in diameter. He quotes Hochstetter,1 who measured in the Greinerwald, near Unter-Waldau, at an elevation of 2563 feet, a silver fir blown down by a storm, which was 9½ feet in diameter at breast height and 200 feet long, and produced 30 klafter of firewood.
The silver fir is planted outside the area of its natural distribution in most parts of France, in Belgium, and in western and northern Germany, but not beyond lat. 51° in eastern Prussia. It is occasionally planted in Norway, and at Christiana has attained 68 feet in length by 34 feet in girth, At Thlebjergene, near Trondhjem, where, on the side of a hill, sloping down to the sea, with an easterly exposure, a fine plantation,’ mainly of spruce and Scots pine, was made in 1872 and subsequent years,—there are some splendid groups of silver fir, 30 to 40 feet in height, appar- ently exceeding in rapidity of growth the native spruce beside it. It is met with in gardens in the Baltic provinces of Russia, as in Lithuania where there is a small wood near Grodno, and in Courland and Livonia; here, however, it always remains a small tree, never bears cones, and is much injured by severe winters.
One of the most remarkable plantations in Europe is the one made by the Hanoverian Oberforster, J.G. von Langen, in the Royal Park of Jegersborg, near Copenhagen, about 1765. I visited this place in 1908, and measured some of the trees. I found that the largest now standing near the entrance at Klampenborg was 125 feet by 12 feet to inches. This tree is figured in a work® kindly sent me by Skovrider H. Mundt. There are, however, many taller trees on the south side of the main drive, two of which I found to be 140 feet by 9 feet, and 140 feet by 8 feet in girth, respectively. I measured the girth of twenty trees out of sixty- two which are growing on an area of 100 by 30 paces, and believe them to average over 130 feet high, with an average girth of 7½ feet. In Lütken’s work full details are given of the measurements of these trees taken in 1893, and confirmed in 1898 by Oppermann, who found 432 trees, averaging 38·9 metres in height and containing 1400 cubic metres per hectare; which is equal to 20,000 cubic feet per acre in the round, or 15,700 feet English quarter-girth measure. My own hasty estimate on the spot was about 12,000 feet English quarter-girth measure per acre. These wonderful silver firs grow on a deep, sandy loam, on level ground near the sea, and seem to have passed their prime. Some of their timber has been used as rafters in the Secretariat hall of the new Raadhus at Copenhagen.
A. pectinata* was brought to the eastern United States early in the nineteenth century ; but it is not hardy even in the middle states.
Witches’ brooms and cankered swellings, due to the fungus Æcidium elatinum, De Bary, are common on the silver fir in the continental forests; and are often seen in Ireland and the south-west of Scotland,°® though apparently rare in England, where they have been noticed in Norfolk® and at Haslemere.’
1 Hochstetter, Aus dem Böhmerwalde, Allg. Augsb. Zeit. 1855, No. 182. Cf. Sendtner, Die Vegetations-Verhältnisse des Bayerischen Waldes (1860).
2 Seen by Henry in 1908.
3 Lütken, Den Langenske Forstordning, p. 286, fig. 5 (Copenhagen, 1899).
4 Sargent, Silva N. Amer. xii. 100, adnot, (1898).
5 Somerville, in Hartig, Diseases of Trees, Eng. trans. 179 (1894).
6 Trans. Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists Soc. vii, p. 255.
7 Specimens at Kew.