106 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS. 



apples and plums, we may have equally indigenous wild 

 cherries. 



Pliny, in an interesting passage, writes as follows : 

 " The cherry did not exist in Italy until the victory of 

 L. Lucullus over Mithridates, in the year of the city 

 680. He was the first to introduce this tree from 

 Pomtus, and now, in the course of one hundred and 

 twenty years, it has travelled beyond the ocean, and 

 arrived even in Britannia." The tree, we are told, was 

 brought from a place called Cerasus, in Pontus, but 

 it is doubtful whether the Romans called the fruit the 

 cerasus from the name of the place, or whether they 

 so called the place from the abundance of the cerasus 

 there, in the same way that saffron is not so called because 

 it was cultivated at Saffron Walden, but Saffron Walden 

 was so called because so much saffron was cultivated in 

 its neighbourhood. Be this as it may, the Romans called 

 the cherry the cerasus, and their name is yet preserved 

 amongst the nations they subdued, as we may see in the 

 French cerise, the Spanish cereza, the Portuguese cereja, the 

 Italian ciriegia, and the English cherry. In Chaucer and 

 other old English writers the word is given as cherise. 



For some long period after the Roman occupation we 

 find no reference to the plant or fruit, and it has been 

 supposed by some writers that the cultivation of the tree 

 was lost during the stormy period that followed ; we hear 

 nothing of it during Saxon, Danish, or Norman occupa- 

 tion, but from a passage in a poem by Lydgate (who 

 was born about 1370), we find that the hawkers of London 

 were then exposing cherries for sale amongst their other 

 wares. 



The wild cherry may be found in flower in the 



