All ashes to the taste.”
These trees producing Dead Sea fruit he tells us bore “fulle faire Apples, and faire of colour to behold; but whoso brekethe hem or cuttethe hem in two, he schalle fynd with in hem Coles and Cyndres, in tokene that, be wratthe of God, the cytees and the lond weren brente and sonken in to Helle.”
Dead Sea Fruit. From Maundevile’s Travels.
In Zahn’s Speculæ Physico-Mathematico-Historicæ we read of a peculiar Mexican tree, called Tetlatia or Gao, which causes both men and animals to lose their hair if they rub themselves against its trunk or sleep beneath its branches. Then we are told of a tree growing in Sofala, Africa, which yields no leaf during the whole year, but if a branch be cut off and placed in water, it grows green in ten hours, and produces abundance of leaves. Again, we read of the Zeibas, immense trees “in the new Kingdom of Granada,” which fifteen men could scarcely encompass with their arms; and which, wonderful to relate, cast all their leaves every twelve hours, and soon afterwards acquire other leaves in their place.
A certain tree is described as growing in America, which bears flowers like a heart, consisting of many white leaves, which are red within, and give forth a wonderfully sweet fragrance: these flowers are said to comfort and refresh the heart in a remarkable manner. A curious account is given of a plant, which Nierenbergius states grows in Bengal, which attracts wood so forcibly, that it apparently seizes it from the hands of men. A similar plant is said to exist in the island of Zeilan, which, if placed between two pieces of wood, each distant twenty paces from it, will draw them together and unite them.
Respecting the Boriza, a plant also known as the Lunaria or Lunar Herb, Zahn states that it is so called because it increases and decreases according to the changes of the moon: for when the moon is one day old, this plant has one leaf, and increases the number of leaves in proportion to the moon’s age until it is fifteen days old; then, as the moon decreases, its leaves one by one fall off. In the no-moon period, being deprived of all its leaves, it hides itself. Just as the Boriza is influenced by the moon, so are certain shrubs under the sway of the sun. These shrubs are described as growing up daily from the sand until noon, when they gradually diminish, and finally return to the earth at sunset.
Gerarde tells us that among the wonders of England, worthy of great admiration, is a kind of wood, called Stony Wood, alterable into the hardness of a stone by the action of water. This strange alteration of Nature, he adds, is to be seen in sundry parts of England and Wales; and then he relates how he himself “being at Rougby (about such time as our fantasticke people did with great concourse and multitudes repaire and run headlong unto the sacred wells of Newnam Regis, in the edge of Warwickshire, as unto the water of life, which could cure all diseases),” went from thence unto these wells, “where I found growing ouer the same a faire Ashe-tree, whose boughs did hang ouer the spring of water, whereof some that were seare and rotten, and some that of purpose were broken off, fell into the water and were all turned into stones. Of these boughes or parts of the tree I brought into London, which when I had broken in pieces, therein might be seene that the pith and all the rest was turned into stones, still remaining the same shape and fashion that they were of before they were in the water.”
The Stone Tree. From Gerarde’s Herbal.