92 THE APOTHECARIES' GARDEN 



fruit. Silk -worms will live on the leaves of 

 any kind of Mulberry schoolboys know that 

 they will even eat Lettuce leaves and produce 

 nice yellow silk but the leaves on which 

 silk-worms thrive best grow on the Chinese 

 Mulberry, which has poor white fruit. All 

 the old Mulberry-trees which the writer has 

 seen round London have dark fruit. So it 

 seems possible that the Black Mulberry may 

 have contributed to the failure to produce silk 

 which could compete with the silk of France, 

 Italy and the East. 



On the other hand, it must not be forgotten 

 that the White Mulberry is a more delicate 

 tree, and so shorter-lived. They were certainly 

 White Mulberries which were ordered to be 

 planted at Hatfield in James Fs time. 1 



Another tree which must have been in 

 existence before the Embankment is the fine 

 Oriental Plane near the fern-house a rare 

 tree in England for some unknown reason. 

 A native of Asia Minor, it was planted and 

 prized in old Rome and Greece for the shade 

 and shelter it gave. 



Its deeply-cut leaf, the outline of which 

 schoolboys are told makes a map of the 

 Peloponesus, distinguishes it from the common 

 London Plane a gardener's variety planted 

 all over London, until rows of Planes have 

 become a little monotonous. 2 On the Con- 



1 History of Gardening in England, by Hon. Lady Cecil. 



2 The reason given for planting so many Planes in London is 

 that they shed their bark, and with it the smoke which has dis- 

 coloured it leaving conspicuous white patches as if the trees 

 had been slashed. Owing to this habit of the Plane, it is said 

 that during the occupation of Hyde Park by troops an officer 

 censured his men for the wanton damage he imagined they had 

 done to the trees. 



