see it clearly
Laurel Tree
Popular names and their suggestiveness of error cannot be better illustrated than by the consideration of the trees known as Laurels. The name is said to be connected with the Latin word laus, "praise;" but the origin of the associations of the name is Greek. Apollo having slain the Python, the ancient serpent, formed from the slime left after Deucalion's flood, fled for purification to the laurel-groves of the vale of Tempe. Here he became enamored of the nymph Daphne, the daughter of the river Peneus, and on his pursuing her she took refuge in her paternal stream, and was metamorphosed into a laurel. Apollo, returning to Delphi, instituted the Pythian games to commemorate his victory, and the prizes there awarded were chiefly crowns of the leaves and berries of the shrub, which henceforth was looked upon as sacred to the god--the Laurea Delphica, or Apollinaris. Apollo being the god of poetry, his emblem, that of victory and clemency, became the favourite of the poets, and hence of scholars generally, so that successful graduates of universities or other learned men became known as "laureates," or "baccalaurei," from the berried crown. Such graduates, like the fellows of colleges down to our own time, were not allowed to marry, lest the duties of husband and father should take them from their literary pursuits, and hence the term "bachelor" became extended to unmarried men in general.
The Laurel was also believed to be a protection against lightning; and accordingly, the Emperor Tiberius, when it thundered, wore a laurel-wreath made from the tree, at the imperial villa on the Flaminian Way, which sprang from a shoot said to have been miraculously sent from heaven to Livia Drusilla. Used as an emblem of truce, like the olive, both trees were equally forbidden to be put to any profane uses; but the crackling of burning laurel-leaves was also employed as a means of divination.
Dr. Lindley argued that the true Delphic Laurel was Ruscus racemosus, sometimes called the "Alexandrian Laurel," a low-growing, berry-bearing shrub, with glossy green leaf-like branches, akin to our English Butcher's-broom; but it is more generally considered that the Daphne of the Greeks was our Bay-tree (Laurus nobilis), fine trees of which now adorn the banks of the Peneus. This, no doubt, was Chaucer's
"Fresh grene laurer tree,
That gave so passing a delicious smelle,"
and was the only laurel generally known in Europe in Shakespeare's time. Its popular name has now, however, been completely transferred to a totally different and unrelated plant, the "Cherry Bay," or "Cherry Laurel" (Prunus laurocerasus, L.). There is little in common between the two plants beyond the evergreen character of their leaves.
Belonging to the natural order Rosaceae, the Cherry Laurel was referred by Linnaeus to the genus Prunus, and is retained in that position by Bentham and Hooker. The genus Prunus is characterized by its fruit being a "drupe"--a succulent fruit, formed from one carpel, with a strong inner layer, or "endocarp," and containing two pendulous ovules, only one of which commonly matures into a seed. The calyx falls off with the petals. The Cherry Laurel differs from the Plums, and agrees with the Cherries, in the absence of "bloom" from the surface of the fruit; but, together with the Bird-cherry (Prunus padus) and the Portugal Laurel (P. lusitanica), it constitutes a distinct sub-genus (Laurocerasus), characterized by having "conduplicate" leaves and "racemes" of flowers, which appear after the leaves, whilst the rest of the genus have their flowers either solitary or in "fascicles." A "fascicle" is a tuft of flowers whose stalks spring nearly from one point, whilst a "raceme" has an elongated main stalk, or peduncle, giving off successive lateral "pedicels," or flower-stalks.
The Cherry Laurel is exceptional among its congeners in having green shoots, and the yellowish-green tint of its leathery evergreen leaves is also characteristic. They somewhat resemble those of the Orange or of the Magnolia. They are "ovate-lanceolate" in outline, are provided with a few scattered teeth along their margins, and (like those of many allied "drupaceous," or "stone-fruit" trees) have from two to four glands on their under surfaces. The "racemes" are shorter than the leaves, and the fruits are "ovate-acute" in outline.
The species is one of rapid growth, increasing from one to three feet in height in a single year; but with us it is somewhat more susceptible to the action of frost than its congener, the Portugal Laurel (Prunus lusitanica). Its long racemes of small white flowers are produced after the young leaves, during April or May; and the fruit, which is green at first, ripens to a pure black by October. This fruit, though insipid, is perfectly harmless.
The Cherry Laurel is wild in sub-alpine woods in Persia, the Caucasus, and the Crimea, and was first introduced into Europe by Clusius in 1576. He received it from David Ungnad, who was at that time ambassador of the Emperor, at Constantinople, and it is related that all the plants sent home by Ungnad to Vienna perished with the exception of one Horse-chestnut and one Laurel, the latter tree being then known as "Trabison curmasi," the "Trebizonde Date, or Plum." Clusius's plant died without flowering; but a cutting from it flowered in 1583. The earliest mention of the plant in England is in "Paradisi in sole Paradisus Terrestris; or, a Garden of all Sorts of Pleasant Flowers, which our English Ayre will admitt to be noursed up: By John Parkinson, Apothecary of London" (1629). It is as follows:--
"Laurocerasus. The Bay Cherry. This beautiful Bay, in his naturall place of growing, groweth to be a tree of a reasonable bignesse and height, and oftentimes with us also, if it be pruned from the lower branches; but more usually in these colder countries it groweth as a shrub or hedge bush, shooting forth many branches, whereof the greater and lower are covered with a dark grayish green barke, but the young ones are very green, whereon are set many goodly, fair, large, thick and long leaves, a little dented about the edges, of a more excellent, fresh shining green colour, and far larger than any Bay leaf, and compared by many to the leaves of the Pomecitron tree (which, because we have none in our countrey, cannot be so well known) both for colour and largenesse, which yeeld a most gracefull aspect; it beareth long stalkes of whitish flowers, at the joynts of the leaves, both along the branches and towards the ends of them also, like unto the Birds Cherry or Padus Theophrasti, which the Frenchmen call Putier and Cerisier blanc, but larger and greater, consisting of five leaves with many threds in the middle; after which cometh the fruit or berries, as large or great as Flanders Cherries, many growing together one by another on a long stalke, as the flowers did, which are very black and shining on the outside, with a little point at the end, and reasonable sweet in taste, wherein is contained a hard, round stone, very like unto a cherry stone, as I have observed as well by those I received out of Italy, as by them I had of Master James Cole, a merchant of London lately deceased, which grew at his house in Highgate, where there is a fair tree which he defended from the bitternesse of the weather in winter by casting a blanket over the top thereof every year. . . . I had a plant hereof by the friendly gift of Master James Cole, the merchant before remembred, a great lover of all rarities, who had it growing with him at his countrey house in Highgate aforesaid, where it hath flowred divers times, and born ripe fruit also. . . . Dalechampius thinketh it to be Lotus Aphricana, but Clusius refuteth it. Those stones or kernels that were sent me out of Italy came by the name of Laurus Regia, The King's Bay."
In the appendix to Johnson's edition of Gerard's Herball (1633) is a similar description, illustrated by two very fair woodcuts. The bark is described as "swart green," and the leaves as "snipt lightly about the edges;" and it is added that--
"It is now got into many of our choice English gardens, where it is well respected for the beauty of the leaves, and their lasting or continuall greennesse. The fruit hereof is good to be eaten, but what physicall vertues the tree or leaves thereof have it is not yet knowne."
In the first edition of his "Sylva," (1664) Evelyn speaks of it as:--
"Resembling (for the first twenty years) the most beautiful-headed orange in shape and verdure, and arriving in time to emulate even some of our lusty timber-trees; so as I dare pronounce it to be one of the most proper and ornamental trees for walks and avenues of any growing." "The leaves," he continues, "boiled in milk, impart a very grateful taste of the Almond; and of the berries, or cherries rather (which poultry generally feed on), is made a wine, to some not unpleasant . . . and of the wood are said to be made the best plough-handles."'
He then relates, with doubts of his own as to the tree's having come more probably "from some colder clime," the not improbable story that the Laurel was introduced "from Civita Vecchia in 1614, by the Countess of Arundel, wife to that illustrious patron of arts and antiquities, Thomas, Earl of Arundel and Surrey." The Countess certainly did return from Italy in that year, which would be consistent with Parkinson's possession of the shrub prior to 1629, and there are still a number of very old laurels at Wardour Castle, the family-seat.
Ray, in 1688, in his "Historia Plantarum," speaks of the Laurel as being then very common in gardens and shrubberies, and remarkably hardy and quick in growth, braving our winters even in exposed situations; but, on account of its thick and woody branches, not fitted for the close-clipt "topiary-work," then so much in fashion. We may, perhaps, attribute to the introduction of the Laurel, and the naturally rapid increase in the popularity of its bright foliage, the victory of a more natural and less formal style of gardening over the Dutch taste for mazes, alleys, peacocks, and tea-pots in yew or box.
Philip Miller, in that store-house of the botanical and horticultural knowledge of his time, the "Gardeners' Dictionary" (Sixth Edition, 1752), speaks of the Laurel as being susceptible to frost if "pruned up, in order to form them into stems," and recommends as preferable the massing or clumping of many plants together, as then first carried out by the Duke of Bedford at Woburn Abbey. He also mentions that near Paris, where it is not as hardy as with us, it was grafted on the cherry or plum--a practice which has, he says, but little, if anything, to recommend it; and he also states that--
"The Berries have long been used to put into Brandy, to make a sort of Ratafia, and the Leaves have also been put into Custards."
The infusion of the leaves, known as laurel-water, seems first to have been recognized as "one of the most speedy and deadly poisons in Nature," about the year 1731, by the Abbe Fontana, whose experiments are described in the 70th volume of the Royal Society's "Philosophical Transactions"; but it was the murder of Sir Theodosius Boughton by his brother-in-law, Captain Donaldson, by means of it, in 1780, that first directed general attention to it; and it was not until 1802 that Schrader identified the results of the distillation of the leaves as oil of bitter almonds and prussic acid. Though a few crumpled leaves may produce sneezing, and will rapidly prove fatal from their fumes to moths and butterflies, they may, like peach-kernels, be used in small quantities for flavoring with impunity.