30 TREES AND TREE-PLANTING. 
ing hollow, and measuring one hundred and eighty feet 
round. At Babylon stands a willow-tree, in an ancient 
garden of Semiramis, and supposed to be coeval with her 
reign. A peculiar sighing sound, heard in its branches, 
and caused by some action of the wind upon them, is 
believed by the Arabs to be the voices of spirits hidden 
within its foliage. As no bird or insect ever lights upon 
it, or flowers grow, or, indeed, live near it, they think 
them evil spirits, whose presence is a bane. 
By the city of Neustadt, in the kingdom of Wirtem- 
berg, there stood a linden-tree which was antique in 
1229, for it is written “that the city of Neustadt, then 
called Helmbundt, was-destroyed in 1226 and rebuilt in 
1229, near the great linden.” It was so well known that 
for centuries Germans spoke of Neustadt as “the city 
near the linden.” A poem of 1408 describes it as stand- 
ing near the gate, its branches propped by sixty-seven 
stone pillars. In 1664 these pillars were increased to 
eighty-two, and in 1832 to one hundred and six. In 1832 
the trunk, at the height of six feet from the ground, 
measured thirty-seven feet ; and it was estimated in that 
year, when a terrible storm rendered it well-nigh a wreck, 
to be eight hundred years old. 
There are oaks in England planted before the Norman 
conquest, 1066, and yew-trees still older; one at Foun- 
tain Abbey, Ripon, in Yorkshire, was said by Pennant 
to be twelve hundred years old; another, in a church- 
yard at Baburn, Kent, measured by Evelyn in 1660, was 
then two thousand eight hundred and eighty years old, 
making it three thousand years old if still standing. 
In the Baider Valley, near Balaklava, there stands a 
walnut-tree which, though twelve hundred years old, has 
not yet forgotten to be useful, but vields annually from 
eighty to one hundred thousand nuts. It belongs to 
five Tartar families, who annually divide the nuts be- 
tween them. 
The finest specimen of the celebrated banyan-tree of 
