CHOICE OF TREES AND SHRUBS FOR CITIES AND RURAL TOWNS.—-NO. 4. 
303 
CHOICE OP TREES AND SHRUBS FOR 
CITIES AND RURAL TOWNS.—No. 4. 
Of all American trees that have been cultivated, 
either at home or abroad, there is no one of which 
so much has been said as the Common Locust. In 
the year 1823, an extraordinary excitement was 
produced in England concerning this tree, by Wil¬ 
liam Cobbett, who resided in America from 1817 to 
1819, and chiefly occupied himself in farming and 
gardening, on Long Island, near New York; and 
during that period, as he tells us in his “Wood¬ 
lands,” published in 1825 to 1828, he was con¬ 
vinced that nothing in the timber way could be of 
so great a benefit as the general cultivation of this 
tree. “ Thus thinking,” continues he, “ I brought 
home a parcel of the seed with me in 1819, but I 
had no means of sowing it till 1823. I then began 
sowing it, but upon a very small scale. I sold the 
plants ; and since that time I have sold altogether 
more than a million of them !” Elsewhere, in the 
same work, he more especially directed attention to 
this subject, urging, in his clear and forcible man¬ 
ner, the immense importance of this tree in ship¬ 
building; and he was the means of thousands of it 
being planted in various parts of Britain. The name 
of locust, as applied to this tree, before Cobbett’s 
time, was but little known inTEngland, and many 
persons, in consequence, thought it was a new tree. 
Cobbett had a large kitchen-garden behind his house 
at Kensington, -which he converted into a nursery ; 
and he also grew trees extensively on his farm at 
Barnes, in Surrey. Although hundreds of the Ro- 
binia pseudacacia stood unasked for in the British 
nurseries, the “ locust plants,” which every one be¬ 
lieved could only be had genuine from Mr. Cobbett, 
could not be grown by him in sufficient quantities 
to supply the demand. He imported the seeds in 
tons; but when he fell short of the real American 
ones, he procured others, as well as young plants, 
from the London nurseries, and passed them off as 
his own raising or importation. Had the people of 
England known that locust-seeds and locust-plants 
were so easily to be obtained, it is probable that the 
locust-mania would never have attained the height 
it did. To show the folly, or the knavery of this 
extraordinary individual, I will quote the following 
from Loudon’s “ Arboretum Britannicum,” which 
should be preserved more as a literary curiosity 
rather than a historical record. “ It is worthy of 
notice,” says Loudon, “ that Cobbett, apparently 
without ever having seen a hop-pole made of locust, 
boldly affirms that the tree is admirably adapted for 
that purpose ; that trees from his nursery, after be¬ 
ing four years planted on Lord Radnor’s estate, at 
Coleshill, were ‘ fit for hop-poles, that will last in 
that capacity for twenty or thirty years at least,’ 
that c such poles are worth a shilling each (that is, 
nearly double what was at that time the price of 
g'ood ash hop-poles); that { five acres would thus, 
in five years, produce £529 and that ‘ each stump, 
left after the pole was cut down, would send up two 
or three poles for the next crop, which, being cut 
down in their turn, at the end of another five years, 
would, of course, produce two or three times the 
above sum!’ that locust-wood is ‘absolutely in¬ 
destructible by the powers of earth, air, and water 
and that * no man in America will pretend to say 
that he ever saw a bit of it in a decayed state.’ 
After this, it will not be wondered at that Cobbett 
should call the locust ‘ the tree of trees,’ and that, 
he should eulogize it in the following passage, 
which is so characteristic of the man, and so well 
exemplifies the kind of quackery in which he dealt, 
that we quote it entire:—‘The time will come,’ he 
observes, ‘ and it will not be very distant, when the 
locust-tree will be more common in England than 
the oak; when a man would be thought mad if he 
used anything but locust in the making of sills, 
posts, gates, joists, feet for rick-stands, stocks and 
axle-trees for wheels, hop-poles, pales, or for any¬ 
thing where there is liability to rot. This time w ill 
not be distant, seeing that the locust grows so fast. 
The next race of children but one, that is to say, 
those who will be born sixty years hence, will 
think that the locust-trees have always been the 
most numerous trees in England ; and some curious 
writer of a century or two hence, will tell his 
readers that, wonderful as it may seem, ‘ the locust 
was introduced to a knowledge of it by, William 
Cobbett.’ What he will say of me besides, I do not 
know ; but I know that he will say this of me. I 
enter upon this account, therefore, knowing that I 
am writing for centuries and centuries to come.’ ”* 
In America, the locust has been planted for orna¬ 
ment in great abundance about farm-houses, and 
along fences and avenues, for more than fifty years; 
and since the forests were in a measure destroyed 
by the axe or fire, by the European settlers, along 
the seaboard and navigable waters inland, many 
persons in the Middle and Eastern States have cul¬ 
tivated this tree with a view to profit, and have not 
only supplied timber and trenails to the shipwrights 
of the cities or commercial towns, but have export¬ 
ed large quantities to England and elsevrhere. These 
plantations seldom exceed an area of thirty acres, 
notwithstanding the agricultural societies of several 
States have offered premiums for their encourage¬ 
ment. Though the Robinia had never been known 
to be injured by any insect, towards the end of the 
last century, in Massachusetts, itwrns generally at¬ 
tacked by the larva) of the Cossus robinice, which 
gradually extended their ravages to the southern¬ 
most points where this tree has been propagated. 
In consequence of this discouragement, the locust 
has been but little cultivated for the last tw T enty 
years in any part of the United States, or in Canada, 
except for the purposes of ornament or shade. In 
a communication received by me from Mr. Stephen 
H. Smith, of Smithfield, in Rhode Island, dated on 
the 22d of November, 1844, he states that, in the 
whiter of 1817, he cut from a lot a heavy growth 
of timber, principally chestnut. The soil on which 
it grew, is a rich loam, on a slightly tenacious sub¬ 
soil. In the following spring, he set out in the 
same ground, at equal distance, about one hundred 
good-sized, yellow locust-trees to the acre. They 
kept pace with the natural growth of the forest that 
sprang up about them. In 1837, twenty years after, 
all the wood was again cut off the same lot, produc¬ 
ing twenty cords to the acre, the locusts measuring 
at the stump from nine to twelve inches in diameter, 
each tree making three posts, seven feet long. The 
sprouts and offsets now occupy one-half the ground 
to the exclusion of a portion of the native timber 
* Arboretum Britannicum, pp 621 ef 62£ 
