The Vegetable World: Being a History of Plants, with Their Botanical Descriptions and Peculiar Properties

| Among the Beeches many handsome varieties, well adapted for

®mamental purposes, from their variously coloured foliage, have ‘riginated. §. purpurea, the Purple Beech, has the young buds and shoots of a rich rose colour. In the Copper Beech (S. cuprea) : they are pale copper colour; in S. variegatus they are white and red, interspersed with streaks of red and purple. In some, the leaves AA

are curled up. In others, as S. pendulata, the branches are pendulous, or weeping. The smooth thin bark of the Beech is apt to develop the knobs called embryo-buds, or abortive branches, which are sometimes used by cabinet makers. Its branches are numerous, and its foliage dense and shady, so that the Bird’s-nest Orchis is often found under its shade, parasitical on its roots; among which also, but not upon them, the common Morel flourishes in the Beech forests of France and Germany. The Chestnut (Castanea vulgaris) is a tree of rapid vegetation, and endowed with great longevity. It attains a height of 20 to 100 feet, occasionally presenting an enormous cit-cumference. Its leaves are large, petiolate, oblong, acutely lanceolate, deeply dentate, coriaceous, smooth composed of five or 5% divisions, with as many OF more stamens, having br locular anthers openi?s from without. The female flowers are, to the number , enveloped involuerum

Fig. 386.——Inflorescence bud of the Horse- Chestnut. externally unequal linear bracteoles. Each female flower consi ovarium, surmounted by a calycinal limb, having five to elg with numerous sts of a loweT ht lobes;

and an equal number of styles. It encloses a like number of cells containing two anatropal ovules. When arrived at maturity, which is in the month of September or October, the involucrum is thick and coriaceous, charged on the outside with a soft prickly fasciculated envelope, and enclosing from one to five unilocular fruits by abortion, known under the name of Chestnuts. The pericarp is coriaceous, fibrous, and hairy on its external surface. The seed contains an embryo without albumen, under a membraneous covering; the cotyledons are voluminous, and plicated with fissures of greater or less depth, and, as is said, farinaceous. The Chestnut is the principal produce obtained from this useful tree; this fruit forms the principal food of the poor populations of the central flats of France, and of the valleys of the Alps. Improved by culture, the Chestnut-tree has given place to the variety called Marronier by the French cultivators, of which several varieties are known. They yield the large Chestnuts which Sometimes come into our markets. The native country of the Chestnut is not very” clearly ascertained; it is probably Asiatic however—at least, the common name is Turkish, and is derived from their custom of grinding up the nuts and mixing it with the food of broken-winded horses, and probably of others also when favourites. The famous Chestnut-tree of Mount Etna, saidin Sicily to be the “Chestnut of a Hundred Horses” (Castagno de cento Cavalli), is teported to be 170 feet in cireumference. Jean Houel gives the history and dimensions of this gigantic tree. “We departed,” he says, “from Ace-Reale in order to visit the Chestnut called of ‘the hundred horses.’ We passed through Saint Alfro and Piraino, where these trees are common, and where we found some superb old chestnuts. They grow very well in this part of Etna, and they are cultivated With great care. N ight not having yet come, we went at once to see the famous Chestnut which was the object of ourjourney. Its size is ‘© much beyond all others that we find it impossible to express the Sensation we experienced on first seeing it. Having examined it carefully, I proceeded to sketch it from nature. I continued my sketch the next day, finishing it on the spot according to my custom, = and T can now say that it is a faithful portrait, having demonstrated ce begmy own satisfaction that the tree was 160 feet incircumference, and

having heard its history related by the savants of the hamlet. (Plate XI.) This tree is called the ‘ Chestnut of a Hundred Horses’ in consequence of the vast extent of ground it covers. They tell me that Jean of Aragon, while journeying from Spain to Naples, stopped in Sicily and visited Mount Etna, accompanied by all the noblesse of Catania on horseback. A storm came on, and the Queen and her cortege took shelter under this tree, whose vast foliage served to protect her and all these cavaliers from the rain. It is true that out of the hamlet the tradition of the Queen’s visit is looked upon as fabulous; bat however that may be, the tree itself seems very capable of doing the office assigned to it.

“This tree with its vaunted diameter is entirely hollow. It is supported chiefly by its bark, having lost its interior entirely by age; but is not the less crowned with verdure. The people of the country have erected a house here, with a sort of furnace for drying the chestnuts and other fruits which they wish to preserve. They are even so indifferent to the preservation of this wonderful natural curiosity that they do not hesitate to cut off branches to burn in the furnace.. ‘‘Some persons think that this mass of vegetation is formed of many trees which have united their trunks;but a careful examma-tion disposes of this notion. They are deceived. All the parts which have been destroyed by time or the hand of man have a belonged to a single trunk. I have measured them carefully pel found the one trunk as I have said, 160 feet in circumference.

We should be inclined to adopt the opinion here hinted, that = this monster tree was the union of several, but M. Houel’s sketch - and description seem conclusive; and his opinion is further _ firmed by the fact that many chestnuts in the neighbourhood Mount Etna are 12 yards in diameter, while one actually measures : 783 feet. Now, what age can be assigned to the Mount Etna Chesnu It is difficult to say. If we are to suppose that each yor itsse ) ' centric layers have only beena line in thickness, this Moe i tree would be not less than three thousand six hundred and ese years old. At Neuve Calle, on the G Lake, there exists another Chesnu®: of gigantic proportions.

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Plate XIII,—The Waluut Tree (/uglaus).

The JugLanpacE®, whose prevailing qualities are acridity and aroma, includes the common Walnut (Juglans regia). (Plate XIII.) t is a large tree, with whitish bark, more or less fissured according to its age. It has a cylindrical stem, rising to a considerable height without branches; the branches are large and spreading, forming an ample and rotund head. The leaves are of a dull greenish colour. The Walnut is indigenous to the Caucasus, Persia, and India. This tree only prospers and is abundantly fruitful when it is completely isolated. The leaves are alternate, smooth, and coriaceous; they are composed of seven or eight acutely ovoid leaflets, superficially sinuate, and are monecious. The flowers, male and female, are disposed in catkins; but in the female catkins the flowers are less numerous. The male catkins have loosely imbricated scales, are pendent, cylindrical, very caducous, and placed at the axil of the leaves which have fallen the preceding year. At the axil of each scale a flower may be observed, composed of a perianth with six divisions, and a variable number of stamens ranging from eighteen to thirty-six, the anthers of which are two-celled, opening from without by two longitudinal clefts. ‘The female flowers are in clusters of drooping catkins, of from one to four, born on the summit of a young shoot produced the same year, presenting a very short, scarcely dentate, exterior envelope, and an interior envelope with four divisions. A short style rises from the centre of the flower, which soon divides Fie. 867.—Cetkin ofthe itself into two stigmatic scaly glands, having an Walnut (Juglans regia). inferior unilocular one-celled ovary, and one _ rect ovule. It is subdivided by spinous dissepiments or partitions, starting from the placenta, into four cells imperfect at the smmnit and the base, and into two others imperfect in all its

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remaining extent. The fruit isa drupe; the external covering a fleshy husk of one piece, separating into irregular segments; the nut, a woody shell, is two-valved; of very hard ligneous fibre, furrowed and wrinkled. The seed—single, erect, and wrinkled by the furrows in the shell—is four-lobed at the summit and at the base, which thus separates by dissepiments. The exterior envelope is at first whitish, then yellowish green, more or less spotted, and is then temarkable for its astringent properties; at the earlier stage it is selected for pickling. The embryo is destitute of albumen, and erect; the cotyledons thick, fleshy, oily, bilol resembling in figure the convolutions presented by the partuosities of the brain of a vertebrated animal. It is these cotyledons which form the nut. The Walnut-tree was known to the Greeks, and cultivated by the Romans, by whom it was much valued for its wood as well as for its nut. There is no record of its introduction into Britain; but Gerarde tells us that “the green and tender nuts, boyled in sugar and eaten as suckade, are a most pleasant and delectable meat, comforting to the stomach, and expelling poyson.” Before the introduction — of mahogany and rose-wood, walnut was in great estimation, and within the last few years it has been restored to its old pre-eminence, its favourite purpose, however, being for gun-stocks, for which its lightness is its qualification. In many parts of Spain, France, Italy, and Germany, the nut forms a great article of food to the people. In all these countries the Walnut-tree is extensively - vated; the district of the Bergstrasse, between Heidelberg an Darmstadt, is almost entirely planted with them, and in some places, according to Evelyn, in his days “no young farmer is —s marry a wife until he brings proof that he is father of a er" number of Walnut-trees.” We need not enlarge on the wel-known fruit, although we may quote Cowley on its virtues -—

“On barren scalps she makes fresh honours grow. Her timber is for various uses good: The carver she supplies with useful wood: She makes the painter’s fading colours last.

A table she affords us, and repast; E’en while we feast, her oil our lamp supplies. The rankest poison by her virtues dies,”:

The Common Walnut (Juglans regia) was originally a native of Persia and the East; there are besides four genera and twenty-seven species, some of them belonging to East India, Persia, Cashmere, and the West Indian Islands, but most of them are American.

GARRYALS.

Diclinous Exogens, with a single floral envelope; sometimes with amentaceous flowers, carpels inferior, a minute embryo in a large mass of albumen. ‘There are only two orders in this group, three genera, and seven species.

Exogenous shrubs of the Western negee yg having their flowers arranged in long pendulous racemes Or catkins, unisexual flowers, a XCVII. Garryacex. site leaves, and pe ate; within concentric sees or — d ‘due

Exogenous shrubs ofJ:, of which only one s Helwingia ruscifiora of Sara, ‘ie Sova taacouteted on ag Talarib, XCVIII. Helwingiacex.and alternate stipulated leaves