64 FOEEIGN PLANTS, HOW INTRODUCED. 



Foreign Plcmts, how Ini^oduced. 



Besides the vegetables I have mentioned, we know that many 

 plants of smaller economical value have been the subjects of 

 international exchange in very recent times. Busbequius, Aus- 

 trian ambassador at Constantinople about the middle of the six- 

 teenth century — ^whose letters contain one of the best accounts of 

 Turkish life which have appeared down to the present day — 

 brought home from the Ottoman capital the lilac and the tuhp. 

 The Belgian Clusius about the same time introduced from the 

 East the horse chestnut, which has since wandered to America. 

 The weeping willows of Europe and the United States are said to 

 have sprung from a slip received from Smyrna by the poet Pope, 

 and planted by him in an Enghsh garden ; Drouyn de I'Huys, in 

 a discourse dehvered before the French Societe d'Acclimitation, 

 in 1860, claims for Rabelais the introduction of the melon, the 

 artichoke and the Alexandria pink into France ; and the Portu- 

 guese declare that the progenitor of all the European and Ameri- 

 can oranges was an Oriental tree transplanted to Lisbon, and still 

 Kving in the last generation.* The present favorite flowers of 

 the parterres of Europe have been imported from America, Japan 

 and other remote Oriental countries, within a century and a haK, 



* The name portogallo, so generally applied to the orange in Italy, seems to 

 favor this claim. The orange, however, was known in Europe before the dis- 

 covery of the Cape of Good Hope, and, therefore, before the establishment of 

 direct relations between Portugal and the East. — See Amaki, Storia dei MumU 

 maniin Sidlia, vol. ii., p. 445. 



For an interesting account of the introduction of the mango into the West 

 Indies, and for other facts bearing on this subject, see a Lecture on the Distr^m. 

 tion of the American Flora, delivered April, 1878, by the President of the 

 Royal Society, Sir J. D. Hooker. 



The date-palms of eastern and southern Spain were certainly introduced by 

 the Moors. Leo von Rozmital, who visited Barcelona in 1476, says that the 

 date-tree grew in great abundance in the environs of that city and ripened its 

 fruit well. It is now scarcely cultivated further north than Valencia. It is 

 singular that Hitter in his very fuU monograph on the pahn does not mention 

 those of Spain. 



On the introduction of coniferm into England see an interesting article in the 

 Edinburgh ReiyietD of October, 18G4. 



MxJLLER, I)a» Buch der Pjkmzenwelt, p. 86, asserts that in 1802 the ancestor 

 of all the mulberries in France, planted in 1500, was still standing in a garden 

 in the village of AUan-Montelimart. 



