224 IN A GLOUCESTERSHIRE GARDEN 



have been so long established that they have good 

 old English names, but there is nothing English either 

 in palm or bamboo, yet there is an interesting history 

 in both the names. It is not easy to see why the 

 Romans should not have taken the Greek name <f)oivL^ 

 for the palm ; yet for some reason they did not, except 

 to a very small extent, but they took a part of it. 

 They rejected the name of the fruit 8aKTvkoi (whence 

 our ' dates '), but instead of the fingers they took the 

 Greek name for the whole hand (TraA-a/AT/), and so called 

 the tree palma, and from that we took our 'palm.' 

 The name bamboo is even more curious. The native 

 name for the plant, or the name by which it was first 

 known in Europe, seems to have been ' mambou,' and 

 so it is called by Gerard and Parkinson, and that was 

 easily changed into bamboo. But that was not all; 

 the native name was Latinised into bamhusa (I believe 

 by Linnseus), and is one of the very few native names 

 of exotic plants that have been so used; tobacco 

 (Latinised into tahacum) and potato (Latinised into 

 batatas) are other instances, but these are both given 

 to distinguish a species and not a genus. 



It is not easy to say when our ancestors first became 

 acquainted with the palm as a living plant. It was 

 described by Theophrastus, Aristotle, and Pliny, and 

 the plant described by all of them was the date palm ; 



