262 WITH THE FLOWERS AND TREES 



cause it is perhaps the best known of California 

 garden shrubs, where besides posing for ornament 

 it is frequently put to utilitarian service as a hedge 

 plant. Its ample cymes of small pinkish white 

 flowers are very attractive. In modern botanical 

 parlance it is Viburnum Tinus, but in everyday 

 speech it is called laurustinus. A plant of all-round 

 virtue, beautiful in leaf, flower and fruit, it is espe- 

 cially serviceable because evergreen and winter 

 blooming, besides lending itself with the utmost 

 complaisance to topiary work. Its native home is 

 the Mediterranean region of Europe where it some- 

 times forms extensive copses in the wild, and where 

 it has been cherished from time immemorial. Its 

 common name is the running together of two Latin 

 words, laurus and tinus, laurus because early bot- 

 anists thought it to be a kind of laurel (which it is 

 not), and tinus because it has been believed to be 

 the plant which Pliny several times, and Ovid at 

 least once, referred to under that name. In the 

 tenth book of "The Metamorphoses" the poet de- 

 scribes Orpheus seated upon a grassy hill, touching 

 his lyre, and as he plays he attracts to him the very 

 rocks and trees and among these is "tinus with 

 azure berries." So in a twinkling does the pretty 

 plant whisk us out of this twentieth-century Cali- 

 fornia with its insane craze for motor-cars and 



