1502 The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland 



Robin in the Jardin des Plantes at Paris, where the stump, largely made up by 

 cement, still remains, and produces a few shoots and flowering branches every year. 1 

 The date of introduction 2 into England is uncertain ; but Parkinson, in his 

 Theatre of Plants, published in 1640, mentions the tree as having been grown by 

 Tradescant " to an exceeding height." During the seventeenth and eighteenth 

 centuries the Robinia was occasionally planted ; but it only came prominently into 

 vogue by the vigorous advocacy of Cobbett, who began to write about it in 1823. 



(A. H.) 



Cultivation 



No tree except the oak has probably been so much written on in England as 

 the Robinia or Locust, as William Cobbett, its great advocate, always called it, 

 though now it is more commonly, though incorrectly, called Acacia. That great 

 Englishman was, during his exile in America, so much impressed with the valuable 

 qualities of its wood, that, though suffering under a grievous and unjust political 

 persecution, " nevertheless I did not forget my country and the duty I still owed to 

 her"; and when he returned to England in 1819 brought with him a parcel of seed, 

 which he had no means of sowing till 1823. He then began sowing it on a very 

 small scale at first, but later he raised it in large quantities, and sold more than a 

 million plants. In Woodlands, Cobbett devoted many pages to an account of this 

 species, which he considered was going to supplant all other trees in England ; but 

 Cobbett's enthusiasm in arboriculture, as in politics, often outran his discretion, and 

 though many of his trees still remain, mostly long past their prime and in a more or 

 less decayed condition, the Robinia has never realised his predictions. It has 

 always been obnoxious to the British woodman, partly on account of its thorns 

 which tore his clothes and hands, partly on account of the hardness of its wood which 

 blunted his tools, and partly because of its liability to be broken by the wind, and to 

 reproduce from suckers when cut. 



Cobbett had many admirers, one of whom, Lord Folkestone, afterwards Earl 

 of Radnor, bought 13,600 locust trees, which were one-year seedlings one year 

 transplanted ; and carried them in a large waggon from Sussex to Coleshill, Berk- 

 shire, in the latter part of March 1824. These were planted in clumps of one to 

 several hundreds in a large plantation in Coleshill Park ; and when Cobbett saw them 

 in 1826 they averaged more than 12 ft. high, and, as he says, "looked like clumps of 

 trees which had been planted many years previous to the planting of the trees of the 

 rest of the plantation." He calculated the cost of trees, trenching, and planting, at 

 ^134, and thought that, at six or seven years old, they would be fit to cut for hop- 

 poles, and then be worth is. each, leaving a profit of ^529 on the five acres which 

 he supposed them to cover. Of course if this profit or anything like it had been 

 realised here or elsewhere, the tree would not have been neglected as it has been 



1 Cf. Acles Premier Congris Internat. Bot. Paris, 536 (1900). This old tree is figured by Sargent in Garden and 

 Forest, iii. 305, fig. (1890). When Elwes saw it in 1905 it had a branch about 40 ft. high producing good foliage. 



3 Dr. Yule, in Mem. Caled, llort. Soc. ii. 413 (1819), states that it was first planted in Scotland by Mr. Cockburn at 

 Ormiston Hall, Haddingtonshire. 



