No doubt it is more
difficult to rear, and requires a far richer soil than the pine and the
larch; but the principal objection to it has been the supposed slowness
of its growth, although that does not appear to be very much greater
than in the oak. Some cedars, which have been planted in a soil well
adapted to them, at Lord Carnarvon's, at Highclere, have grown 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.
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