THE TAMAEISK 151 



collected is very trifling, perhaps not amounting to five or six hun- 

 dred pounds, even in seasons when the most copious rains fell. It is 

 entirely consumed among the Bedouins, who consider it the greatest 

 dainty which their country affords. The harvest usually begins in 

 June, and lasts six weeks." 



That the Tamarisk has but little claim to be 

 indigenous in England is evidenced by the language 

 used by Robert Turner, in his " Botanologia," as late 

 as 1664. " It is," he says, " well known in Gardens, 

 where it onely grows, in England." As a cultivated 

 plant it was not apparently known, as in France, to 

 be pleasing to sheep on account of its salinity, and its 

 medical repute seems to have been lost, for Browne, 

 the poet, writes of it early in the same century as 



" For huswives' besomes onely knowne most good." 



In its apparently wild state in England it only 

 occurs along the coast from Cornwall to Suffolk. 

 First noticed about St. Michael's Mount, it has been 

 suggested that it may have been brought there by 

 smugglers, either from the Channel Islands, where it 

 is naturalised, or from the French coast. One would 

 like to think of it as a lasting reminder of the eccle- 

 siastical dependence of the Cornish Mount upon the 

 Norman Mont St. Michel, in the neighbourhood of 

 which abbey-fortress we have seen it growing in 

 abundance. Its introduction into the Lizard district 

 is traditionally attributed to a carter who, having lost 

 his whip, gathered one of the long flexible branches 

 at the Mount, and at the conclusion of his journey 

 stuck the rod into the ground — a, story which bears 

 witness to the ease with which this tree can be 

 reproduced by cuttings. So, too, there is a tree in 



