North Carolina Standard

Immense Trees. The Baobab of Senegal, (Adansonia digitata,) the Bald Cypress of Oaxaca, (Taxodium distichum,) and the famous chestnut of Etna, have been often cited as the giants of the vegetable kingdom. But these sovereigns are dethroned, and put into the second rank by those lately discovered in Tasmania, which leave far behind them those antique monuments of nature. Last week I went to see the two largest trees existing in the world. Both of them are on the border of a small stream tributary to the river of North West Bay, in the rear of Mount Wellington. They are of the species named there Swamp Gum; and my companions (five of us) measured them. One of them had fallen; we therefore easily obtained its dimensions. We found its body two hundred feet from the ground to the branch. The top had broken off and partly decayed, but we ascertained the entire height of the tree to have been certainly three hundred feet. We found the diameter of the base of it to be thirty feet, and at the first branch twelve feet. Its weight we estimated to be four hundred and forty tons. The other tree, now growing, without the least sign of decay, resembles an immense tower rising among the humble sassafras trees, although very large in fact. The Gum tree at three feet above the ground measured one hundred and two feet in circumference. In the space of a square mile, I think there were not less than one hundred of these trees, none less than forty feet in circumference. It must require several thousand years to produce the largest.

Revue Horticole.