THE TAMARISK 149 



see thys tree in Englande, but ofte in high Germany, and in Italy. 

 The Potioaries of Colon before I gave them warning vsed for thys, 

 the bowes of vghe, and the Potioaries of London vse nowe for thys 

 quik tree, the scholemaisters in Englande have of longe tyme called 

 myrioa heath or lyng, but so longe have they bene deoeyved al 

 together. It maye be called in englishe, tamarik." 



In the face of this statement we do not know why 

 Sir J. E. Smith says that it was " commonly planted 

 in English gardens and shrubberies, long before Arch- 

 bishop GrindaU imported ... it ... to cure indur- 

 ations of the spleen." Fuller says that it was about 

 1560 that Grindal introduced the Tamarisk from 

 Germany ; but Loudon thinks the date 1582, given 

 by Camden and Hakluyt, more probable. It was cer- 

 tainly in 1558 that Grindal returned from the Contin- 

 ent, and it was in the following year that he became 

 Bishop of London ; whilst it is to this period of his 

 life that the story belongs of Queen Elizabeth's visiting 

 him at Fulham and complaining that he had planted 

 so many trees round his house that she could not see 

 out of her bedroom windows. In 1582 Grindal, then 

 Archbishop of Canterbury, became blind, and in the 

 following year he died, nor did he ever revisit the 

 Continent after 1558. The "German Tamarisk" in- 

 troduced by him was probably the glaucous shrub 

 now known as Myrica'ria german'ica. Gerard, in the 

 catalogue of plants in his garden in 1596, enumerates 

 "Tamariscus Germanicus aut Nerbonensis," and 

 " Tamariscus Italicus " ; and Parkinson, who distin- 

 guishes four kinds in his " Theatrum Botanicum" 

 (1640), informs us that " the leaves boyled in wine 

 and drunk . . . helpeth the jaundise^ and the chol- 

 hck, and the bitings of the Spider Phalangium, the 



