with extraordinary rapidity.  Of the cedars planted in the royal garden at Chelsea, in 1683, two had, in eighty-three years, acquired a circumference of more than twelve feet, at two feet from the ground, while their branches increased over a circular space forty feet in diameter.  Seven-and-twenty years afterwards the trunk of the largest one had extended more than half a foot in circumference; which is probably more than most oaks of a similar age would do during an equal period.  The surface soil in which the Chelsea cedars throve so well is not by any means rich; but they seem to have been greatly nourished from a neighbouring pond, upon the filling up of which they wasted away.

Various specimens of the cedar of Lebanon are mentioned as having attained a very great size in England.  One planted by Dr. Uvedale, in the garden of the manor-house at Enfield, about the middle of the seventeenth century, had a girth of fourteen feet in 1789; eight feet of the top of it had been blown down by the great hurricane in 1703, but still it was forty feet in height.  At Whitton, in Middlesex, a remarkable cedar was blown down in 1779.  It had attained the height of seventy feet; the branches covered an area one hundred feet in diameter; the trunk was sixteen feet in circumference at seven feet from the ground, and twenty-one feet at the insertion of the great branches twelve feet above the surface.  There were about ten principal branches or limbs, and their average circumference was twelve feet.  About the age and planter of this immense tree its historians are not agreed, some of them referring its origin to the days of Elizabeth, and even alleging that it was planted by her own hand.  Another cedar, at Hillingdon, near Uxbridge, had, at the presumed age of 116 years, arrived at the following dimensions; its height was fifty-three feet, and the spread of the branches ninety-six feet from east to west, and eighty-nine from north to south.  The circumference of the trunk, close to the ground, was thirteen feet and a half; at seven feet it was twelve and a half; and at thirteen feet, just under the branches, it was fifteen feet eight inches.  There were two principal branches, the one twelve feet and the other ten feet in girth.  The first, after a length of eighteen inches, divided into two arms, one eight feet and a half, and the other seven feet ten.  The other branch, soon after its insertion, was parted into two, of five feet and a half each.[2]

    [2] We believe the finest cedars in England to be those at Juniper
        Hall, between Leatherhead and Dorking.

The Yew Tree