174 HISTORICAL NOTES ON 



at various times been introduced into Italy, and are now become 

 move or less common in Tuscany. The list comprises nearly one 

 hundred, but among them there are many which have only been 

 carried there from English gardens in the latter half of the 

 eighteenth century, whose history is of little interest, or may be 

 found in any of our Garden Catalogues, and which are therefore here 

 omitted. It will be suflBcient for our present purpose to extract 

 some notes relative to the more important, especially to those 

 which have been so long cultivated in Italy as to have become 

 almost naturalised. 



Among them one of the earliest known is the Oriental Plane- 

 tree (Platanus orientalis), a native of Western Asia, highly 

 prized by the Romans, as we learn from Pliny, for its grateful 

 shade, and celebrated by their most distinguished poets and 

 orators. The same naturalist informs us that it was brought 

 from Asia across the Ionian sea to plant round the sepulchre of 

 Diomedes, in the island named after him, now Pelagosa, one of 

 the Tremiti isles off the Adriatic coast of the kingdom of 

 Naples. Plane-trees were subsequently imported into Sicily, and 

 from thence by Dionysius the First to a garden of his at Reggio 

 in Calabria, whence they spread over the rest of Italy. They 

 were, according to Pliny, brought to the neighbourhood of Rome 

 by a freedman of Marcellus Exerminus in the time of the 

 Emperor Claudius, and have ever since been extensively planted 

 in Italy, where they attain a great age and size."* It is there- 

 fore a matter of no small surprise that so many ages should 

 have elapsed before this tree found its way into other European 

 states. It was not known in France until Buffon planted it in the 

 Jardin du Roi in the middle of the eighteenth century ; but 

 Clusius had already carried it to Vienna as early as 1576, and in 

 England it had been imported somewhat earlier still by Sir 

 Nicholas Bacon, father of the Chancellor, who planted it in his 

 garden at Verulam in 1548. 



The American Plane (Platanus occidentalis), now become very 

 common in Italy, and generally preferred to the Oriental, was 

 only introduced there long after Tradescant had brought it to 

 England from Virginia about the year 1640. 



Another tree, no less celebrated for the beauty of its shade, so 

 valuable a quality in Italian climates, is the Diospyros lotus, like 



* A plane-tree is mentioned as still existing at Arcoli in 1813, which, 

 from authentic records, was then at least five centuries old. 



