266 WOODY PLANTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 
great numbers, in Chelsea, on the turnpike road to Salem, and 
in West Cambridge, in several places on the road to Lexington. 
This species is a native of Britain, and has been much culti- 
vated in England for basket work. Fora few yeais, in moist 
ground, it annually produces rods six or eight feet long, but 
these gradually become shorter, and the plant ceases to be worth 
cultivating. 
Sp. 11. Tue Beprorp Wow. S. Russellidna. Smith. 
Introduced. 
So named in honor of the Duke of Bedford, who first brought it into notice. 
Figured in Sowerby’s Eng. Botany, 1807, and Loudon, III, 1518. 
Leaves lanceolate, tapering at each end, strongly serrated throughout, 
smooth, very pale beneath; footstalhs glandular, o: leafy , stipules half heart- 
shaped, strongly serrate, pointed, ovary stalked, lanceolate, smooth, longer 
than the scale ; style as long as the bifid stigmas, scales natiow, lanceolate, 
slightly cilated.—Hooher, British Flora, 418; Loudon, Arb , 1517. 
This tree, a native of Britain, attains sometimes to as great a 
height as the crack willow, and is considered far more valuable. 
It 1s remarkable for the rapidity of its growth 1n its natural soil, 
and it grows with more vigor, in the neighborhood of Boston, 
than any other willow, native or foreign. The favorite tree of 
Dr. Johnson, at Litchfield, which was destroyed a few years 
ago by a hurricane, was of this species.* It is extensively cul- 
tivated in England for poles, for 1ts wood, and for its bark, which 
has been ascertained to contain more of the tannin principle 
than the oak. Mr. Lowe, in Ins survey of Nottinghamshire, 
says that a plantation of it, of eight years’ growth, yiclded a 
net profit of 2147. per acre. It flowers in April or May. 
This tree may be known from the others of this group by the 
length and brightness of the leaves, their large serratures, and 
their occasionally leafy footstalks, and by the length and 
* A few years before the Doctor’s death, this tree measured fifteen fect nine 
inches in circumference, at the ground, and eleven feet ten inches at the smallest 
place below the branches. It continued to increase till 1810, when it measured 
twenty-one feet in girth, at six feet from the ground. In 1829, it was blown down. 
Loudon has given a figure of this tree as it appeared at the time of Dr Johnson’s 
death, and also just before its destruction. See Arboretum, III, pp. 1520, 1521. 
