116 THE CHERRY. 



can there be any doubt, that, in permanent utility, it was 

 the most valuable of his acquisitions. Some authors, how- 

 ever, are of opinion that the wild Cherry 1 was the same as 

 the Cornel, which was indigenous in Italy at the time, but 

 not cultivated as a fruit-tree, and that Lucullus only intro- 

 duced improved sorts. At all events, it does not appear to 

 have been cultivated previously to the time of Lucullus, 

 though afterwards it increased so rapidly that, in the 

 course of a hundred and twenty years, it had reached even 

 Britain. 



According to the foregoing statement, the Cherry-tree 

 was introduced into Britain before A. D. 53. The earliest 

 mention of the fruit being exposed to sale by hawkers in 

 London is in Henry the Fifth's reign, 1415. New sorts 

 were introduced from Flanders, by Richard Haines, Henry 

 the Eighth's fruiterer, and being planted in Kent, were 

 called " Flanders " or " Kentish Cherries," of which 

 Gerard (1597) says, "They have a better juice, but watery, 

 cold, and moist." Philips says, " There is an account of 

 a Cherry-orchard of thirty -two acres in Kent, which, in 

 the year 1540, produced fruit that sold, in those early days, 

 for 1,000/. ; which seems an enormous sum, as at that 

 period good land is stated to have let at one shilling per 

 acre." Evelyn tells us, that in his time (1662) an acre 

 planted with Cherries, one hundred miles from London, 

 had been let at 10Z. During the Commonwealth (1649), 

 the manor and mansion of Henrietta Maria, Queen of 

 Charles I., at Wimbledon, in Surrey, were surveyed pre- 

 viously to being sold, and it appears that there were 

 upwards of two hundred Cherry-trees in the gardens. 

 Since that time the Cherry-tree has found universal ad- 

 mission into shrubberies, gardens, and orchards. Kent 

 still continues the principal county for cherries ; yet 

 nowhere do they grow in greater luxuriance and beauty 

 than on the banks of the Tamar, in Devonshire, where 



1 The fruit of this tree was subsequently called the Cornel-Cherry 

 by some authors. 



