Chamærops with palmate boughs, prickly footstalks, and simple sheaths.
REFERENCE TO THE PLATE.
1. Empalement and blossom.
2. The same shown from the outer side.
3. The chives.
The Dwarf Fan-Palm is the only species indigenous to Europe, where it grows naturally in Italy on the coast of Etruria, in the Island of Sicily, and in Spain in the province of Valencia, where we are informed by Cavanilles, in his Icones Plantarum, (vol. ii. p. 12.) it is most commonly found stemless, and in that tract called Desierto de las Palmas, or the Desert of Palms, with stems rarely exceeding two feet in height. In the district of Xabea, however, on the coast of the Mediterranean, he found many with stems fourteen feet high, and one as high as thirty feet. The same author informs us that the lower part of the stem, which enters the earth, and the heads of young blossoms before they burst from the sheath, are eaten by the Spaniards, to whom also the leaves are of the greatest utility, furnishing them with mats, ropes, brooms, and baskets, in the manufacture of which boys are principally employed, and women during the evenings in winter. Many of our fair countrywomen, we fear, spend their evenings less usefully. Professor Pontedera, in his Anthologia, published at Padua in 1720, has given three good plates of the Chamærops and its fructification, taken from a plant, the stem of which was twelve feet high, growing in the public garden there. From this author we learn that the young shoots or suckers from the bottom of the plant (called there cefaglioni) are eaten by the Italians. The Chamærops also grows spontaneously upon uncultivated hills on the coast of Barbary, where the lower part of the young stems and the roots are also eaten by the Moors; and the leaves, after being macerated in water, made into mats, ropes, baskets, &c., as in Spain. (See Desfontaines’ Flora Atlantica, vol. iii. p. 473.) Willdenow takes notice of two varieties of the Chamærops, one of which is nearly stemless, and the other twenty feet in height; and the former of which is probably that cultivated in England, as we have never met with any of a large size, although the plant has been in our gardens since the year 1731; while that in the Jardin des Plantes at Paris, (nearly twenty feet high,) mentioned by Chevalier Lamarck in the Encyclopédie Méthodique, seems to be the second variety. Our drawing was taken early in March, in Malcolm’s Nursery at Kensington, from a male plant about two feet in height with three fine bunches of male blossoms.
PLATE DC.
GÆRTNERA RACEMOSA.
Racemed Gærtnera.
CLASS X. ORDER I.