[184] Populus, L. Our species are peculiar to the country, as the author’s remark suggests. Wood (l. c.) notices “the ever-trembling asps.”
[185] “The plumbs of the country be better for plumbs than the cherries be for cherries. They be black and yellow; about the bigness of damsons; of a reasonable good taste.”—New-Eng. Prospect, chap. v. Prunus maritima, Wangenh. (beech-plum), and P. Americana, Marsh. (wild yellow plum), are no doubt here intended; as also, it is likely, by Josselyn, who, it is evident, in this place had only the genus in mind as “common with us in England.”—[See p. 61] for the author’s mention of the “wild cherry.”
[186] Portulaca oleracea, L. (Gerard, p. 521). “In cornfields. It is eaten as a pot-herb, and esteemed by some as little inferior to asparagus.”—Cutler; Account of Indigenous Vegetables (1785), l. c., p. 447. Considered to have been introduced here; but our author enables us to carry back the date of its introduction, without reasonable doubt, to the first settlement of the country. “Purslain, Mr. Glover says, is also very common in Virginia, and troublesome too, to the tobacco-planters.” Sir Philip Skippon to Ray, Feb. 11, 1675-6, in Ray Society’s Corresp. of John Ray, p. 121. Mr. Nuttall regarded the species as indigenous on the plains of the Missouri; but this plant, “too closely resembling the common purslane,” according to Prof. Gray (Man., p. 64), has been separated as specifically distinct by Dr. Engelmann.
[187] Genista tinctoria, L. (Genistella tinctoria,—greenweed, or dyers’ weed; Gerard, p. 1316). “We shall not need to speake of the use that diers make thereof,” says the latter. Our author could hardly have been mistaken about so well-known a plant as this; which he probably met with in one of his visits to the neighborhood of Boston,—long the only American station for it. There is a tradition that it was introduced here by Gov. Endicott; which may have been some forty years before Josselyn finished his herborizing,—enough to account for its naturalization then. It was long confined to Salem (“pastures between New Mills and Salem,”—Cutler, l. c., 1785); but occurred to me sparingly, in 1841, on the shores of Cambridge Bay, and also on roadsides in Old Cambridge. “Woad-seed” is set down, in a memorandum of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay, before February, 1628, to be sent to New England (Mass. Col. Rec., vol. i. p. 24); and though Isatis tinctoria, L., is true woad, Reseda luteola, L. (wold, or weld), and our Genista (woadwaxen), have, it is said (Rees’s Cycl., in loco), been known “in English herbals under that name.”
[188] “Current-bushes are of two kinds,—red and black. The black currents, which are larger than the red, ... are reasonable pleasant in eating.”—Voyages, p. 72. Our black currant is Ribes floridum, Herit.,—considered by Linnæus (Sp. Pl., p. 291) only a variety of R. nigrum, L., the true black currant of the gardens; and our red currant, which I have gathered in the White Mountains,—far below the region of R. rigens, Michx., the more common red currant there,—appears to be undistinguishable from R. rubrum, L. (the red currant of gardens); unless, possibly, as an American variety of it. This is probably R. albinervium, Michx. (Fl., vol. i. p. 110; Pursh, Fl., vol. i. p. 163).
[189] Polyporus, Mich., sp.—In his Voyages, p. 70, the author speaks of “a stately tree growing here and there in valleys, not like to any trees in Europe; having a smooth bark, of a dark-brown colour, the leaves like great maple in England called sycamor; but larger,”—which may be Platanus occidentalis, L. (button-wood). And Wood enables us to add one more to this early account of the genera of plants, which we possess, common to the Old World. He tells us (New-England’s Prospect, chap. v.) “the hornbound tree is a tough kind of wood, that requires so much pains in riving as is almost incredible; being the best to make bowls and dishes, not being subject to crack or leak. This tree growing with broad-spread arms, the vines twist their curling branches about them; which vines afford great store of grapes,” &c. This was our American hornbeam (Carpinus Americana, L.). And the same author again alludes to it, in verse, as—
“The horn-bound tree, that to be cloven scorns;
Which from the tender vine oft takes his spouse,
Who twines embracing arms about his boughs.”
A pleasant enough illustration of what taught classical husbandry,—“ulmis adjungere vites.”—Georg., i. 2.