102 BEAUTIES OF BBITISS TREES. [Dec, 



the Lombardy Poplar is mainly one of landscape effect. True, the 

 golden tints of its young foliage, now yellow, now brown, now 

 russet-red, before it decides on being a dull green, may cheer the 

 topmost window of a lofty London house ; but properly it should 

 never stand alone and should always be so placed that the row of 

 vertical green plumes may serve to break or to contrast some hori- 

 zontal line — a river bank, a road, an unsightly railway embankment, 

 or the arches of a viaduct or aqueduct, as in the annexed wood-cut. 



Its suckers form an objection to the planting of the Lombardy 

 Poplar near the lawn ; but on artistic grounds also, it is desirable that 

 it should be planted in a row at some distance from the house or 

 other point of view. 



The Privet (Ligustrum vulgarc) is so generally well-known a 

 shrub that but little need be said in pointing out its beauties. 



It affords a remarkable instance of the transference of names from 

 one thing to another that characterises popular, as opposed to 

 scientific, nomenclature ; for it was originally called ' Primrose.' 

 This name was originally ' primaverola,' the Italian diminutive from 

 ' prima vera,' i.e., the first flower of spring. This became in French 

 ' primeoerole,' and in early English ' primerole ' and ' primerolles,' 

 from which stages we get both the Latinised * primula,' and by a 

 false etymology that has often affected our spelling, 'primrose.' In 

 that most valuable English-Latin Dictionary, the ' Promptorium 

 Paroulorum,' written by Geoffrey the Grammarian, a Dominican, or 

 Black Eriar, at Bishop's Lynn, in Norfolk, in 1440, it is entered as, 

 ' Prymerose, primula, calendula, ligustrum.' Turner, in his ' Libellus 

 de re Herbaria says decidedly ' ligustrum arlor est noii herha ut 

 literatorum vulgus credit ; nihil que minus est quam a Frijmerose,' 

 i.e., the ligustrum [of the ancients] is a tree and not a herbaceous 

 plant, as the great mass of scholars believe it to be, for it is nothing 

 less than a Primrose ; ' whilst a little later honest old Thomas Tusser, 

 in his ' Goode Poiutes of Husbandrie,' speaks of it as ' Privey or 

 Prim,' and Gerard calls it * Privet or Prim Print.' This last name is 

 explained as prime, printemps. Though Shakespeare apparently 

 always alludes, under the name of I'rimrose, to the plant now so 

 called, as late as 1G57 we find William Coles, in his 'Adam in 

 Eden,' applying that name to the shrub. 



The Privet belongs to the same natural order as the Olive, the Ash 

 and the Lilac, and is more distantly related to the Jasmine. The 

 whole order consists of trees and shrubs giving off their leaves, and 

 consequently their branches, in opposite pairs, and having fiowers 

 that are mostly small, but clustered together in tricliotomous cymes, 

 i.e., on flower-stalks springing in threes from one point, and often 

 branching repeatedly in the same manner. They thus gain col- 



