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

48 The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland
which is a perfect child's puzzle of slabs of different sizes, with 5 or 6 distinct sides
to each, all fitted together with the neatness of a honeycomb. I tried in vain to
find some system on which it was arranged. We had the good fortune to see a
group of guanacos feeding quietly under the old trees. They looked strange
enough to be in character with them, having the body of a sheep and the head of
a camel; and they let us come quite near. On the other side of the mountains they
are used as a beast of burden, though so weak that ten of them could not carry the
load of an average donkey. After wandering about the lower lands, we climbed
through the bogs and granite boulders to the top of one of the hills, and came
suddenly to a most wonderful view, with seven snowy cones of the Cordillera
piercing their way through the long line of mist which hid the nearer connecting
mountains from sight, and glittering against the greenish blue sky. Each one
looked perfectly separate and gigantic, though the highest was only 10,000 feet
above the sea. Under the mist were hills of beech forest, and nearer still the
Araucaria domes, while the foreground consisted of noble old specimens of the same
trees grouped round a huge grey boulder covered with moss and enriched with
sprays of embothrium of the brightest scarlet. No subject could have been finer,
if I could only have painted it, but that ' if' has been plaguing me for years, and
every year seems to take me farther from a satisfactory result."
Inspired by this charming description, and by a desire to see the magnificent
forests of Southern Chile, whence I hoped to introduce new trees and plants to our
gardens, I visited Chile in the winter of 1901-1902, and after various difficulties
caused by the dispute about the frontier, which nearly led to a war between Chile and
Argentina, I started from the hospitable home of my friends, Mr. George and
Senora Bussey at San Ignacio, to see the Araucarias in the Sierra de Pemehue,
a region where they attain their greatest perfection, and which, having only been
recently conquered from the Indians, had been described by no scientific traveller;
though Senor Moreno has written an excellent account of the Argentine side of the
frontier, which I visited later.
The Sierra de Pemehue is a range of mountains lying on the west side of the
upper course of the great Bi'obio river, and is not, strictly speaking, a part of the
Cordillera of the Andes, from which it is separated by that river. The greater part
of it is covered with splendid forests, principally composed of beeches, Fagus
obliqua and Fagus Dombeyi, and it was near the head-waters of the Renaico river that
I first saw what is to me the most striking of all trees hardy in England, and the
only Chilean tree which as yet seems to have acclimatised itself thoroughly in this
country.
They were growing in scattered groups on the cliffs far above us at an elevation
of 3000-4000 feet, and we did not enter the Araucaria forest till we got near the top of
the pass, which crossed over a mountain called Chilpa, between the Renaico and the
Villacura valleys. Here the trees were growing scattered among Coigue trees (Fagus
Dombeyi}, and higher up in a forest mainly composed of Niere (Fagus anlarclica),
many of which were killed by forest fires, which had not, however, destroyed the
thick-barked Araucarias, though I saw here but few young trees and no seedlings.
Araucaria 49
Their average height was 80-90 feet, and the diameter 2-3 feet, and the branches were
mostly confined to the top of the tree, where they form a dense, flat-topped crown.
On 27th January I saw much finer specimens in the valley above Lolco, on the road to
Longuimay, and my companion, Mr. Bartlett Calvert, was successful in getting some
excellent photographs which are here reproduced. Plate 17 shows the appear
ance of mature and young trees growing in an open grassy valley at about 4500 feet,
with the high volcanoes of Longuimay and Tolhuaca in the background. The old
tree on the right of the picture is about 90 feet, and the young one about 20 feet
high, showing sixteen years of growth from a point 2-3 feet from the ground where
the annual growths could no longer be distinguished. I therefore suppose this young
tree to be twenty to twenty-five years old from seed.
Farther on in the same valley we came to much larger trees, which showed the
curiously irregular slabs of bark of which Miss North speaks. The largest trees I
saw had a-girth of 24 feet at breast height, and were 90-100 feet high. The longest
fallen stems I measured were little over 100 feet, and I should say 80-90 was the
average height of full-grown ones. Plate 18 shows the habit which the trees assume
when grown thickly at about 3500 feet elevation in the upper Villacura valley.
On the wind-swept ridges which we crossed higher up the pass, at an approximate
elevation of 6500 feet, the Araucarias were much more stunted and had a very different
habit of growth, but the high wind which prevailed, as it usually does at this season,
made it impossible to photograph them. Two days later at Los Arcos, the frontier
post of Argentina, I found scattered groves of Araucaria for about fifty miles
south, as far as the valley of Quillen, but when we reached the country about the
head-waters of the Pichelifeu river, about lat. 39 30' S., I saw no more except a
few isolated trees which appeared to have sprung up from seeds dropped by the
Indians on their old camping grounds.
I had previously been told by Mr. Barton of Buenos Ayres, who is engaged in
cutting timber on the north shore of the great lake Nahuelhuapi, about 100 miles to
the south, that the Araucaria was found near this lake, and I had great hopes of
discovering and introducing a new southern variety or species, which might prove
hardier than A . imbricala.
But notwithstanding what Poeppig says as to the probability of its extension
as far south as lat. 46 , I saw not a single tree on my journey from San Martin via
Nahuelhuapi to Puerto Montt in lat. 41 50', and none of the explorers who have been
recently employed in surveying the frontier have, so far as I know, found it south of
about lat. 41 . Sir T. Holdich is my authority for this statement.
Some of the trees here had much smoother bark covered with long tufts of grey
lichen, and in this part of the forest there were plenty of young seedlings coming up,
some of which I took up and unsuccessfully attempted to transplant to my friend's
garden at San Ignacio.
The geographical range of the tree is therefore a very limited one, extending
only from Antuco in about lat. 38 40' to lat. 40 in the Cordillera, and on the coast
range from about lat. 38 30' to an unknown point probably not south of about lat. 41 .
For, though Poeppig says it occurs on the Corcovado, he was speaking only from
H