The Portugal laurel is a native of Portugal and Madeira. It was introduced into England about the year 1648, when it was cultivated in the Oxford Botanic Gardens. During the first half of the 18th century this plant, the common laurel and the holly were almost the only hardy evergreen shrubs procurable in British nurseries. They are all three tender about Paris, and consequently much less seen in the neighbourhood of that city than in England, where they stand the ordinary winters but not very severe ones. There is a variety (myrtifolia) of compact habit with smaller narrow leaves, also a variegated variety.
The evergreen glossy foliage of the common and Portugal laurels render them well adapted for shrubberies, while the racemes of white flowers are not devoid of beauty. The former often ripens its insipid drupes, but the Portugal rarely does so. It appears to be less able to accommodate itself to the English climate, as the wood does not usually “ripen” so satisfactorily. Hence it is rather more liable to be cut by the frost. It is grown in the open air in the southern United States.
The bay or sweet laurel (Laurus nobilis) belongs to the family Lauraceae, which contains sassafras, benzoin, camphor and other trees remarkable for their aromatic properties. It is a large evergreen shrub, sometimes reaching the height of 60 ft., but rarely assuming a truly tree-like character. The leaves are smaller than those of the preceding laurels, possessing an aromatic and slightly bitter flavour, and are quite devoid of the poisonous properties of the cherry laurel. The small yellowish-green flowers are produced in axillary clusters, are male or female, and consist of a simple 4-leaved perianth which encloses nine stamens in the male, the anthers of which dehisce by valves which lift upwards as in the common barberry, and carry glandular processes at the base of the filament. The fruit consists of a succulent berry surrounded by the persistent base of the perianth. The bay laurel is a native of Italy, Greece and North Africa, and is abundantly grown in the British Isles as an evergreen shrub, as it stands most winters. The date of its introduction is unknown, but must have been previous to 1562, as it is mentioned in Turner’s Herbal published in that year. A full description also occurs in Gerard’s Herball (1597, p. 1222). It was used for strewing the floors of houses of distinguished persons in the reign of Elizabeth. Several varieties have been cultivated, differing in the character of their foliage, as the undulata or wave-leafed, salicifolia or willow-leafed, the variegated, the broad-leafed and the curled; there is also the double-flowered variety. The bay laurel was carried to North America by the early colonists.
This laurel is generally held to be the Daphne of the ancients, though Lindley, following Gerard (Herball, 1597, p. 761), asserted that the Greek Daphne was Ruscus racemosus. Among the Greeks the laurel was sacred to Apollo, especially in connexion with Tempe, in whose laurel groves the god himself obtained purification from the blood of the Python. This legend was dramatically represented at the Pythian festival once in eight years, a boy fleeing from Delphi to Tempe, and after a time being led back with song, crowned and adorned with laurel. Similar δαφνηφορίαι were known elsewhere in Greece. Apollo, himself purified, was the author of purification and atonement to other penitents, and the laurel was the symbol of this power, which came to be generally associated with his person and sanctuaries. The relation of Apollo to the laurel was expressed in the legend of Daphne (q.v.). The victors in the Pythian games were crowned with the laurels of Apollo, and thus the laurel became the symbol of triumph in Rome as well as in Greece. As Apollo was the god of poets, the Laurea Apollinaris naturally belonged to poetic merit (see [Laureate]). The various prerogatives of the laurel among the ancients are collected by Pliny (Hist. Nat. xv. 30). It was a sign of truce, like the olive branch; letters announcing victory and the arms of the victorious soldiery were garnished with it; it was thought that lightning could not strike it, and the emperor Tiberius always wore a laurel wreath during thunderstorms. From its association with the divine power of purification and protection, it was often set before the door of Greek houses, and among the Romans it was the guardian of the gates of the Caesars (Ovid, Met. i. 562 sq.). The laurel worn by Augustus and his successors had a miraculous history: the laurel grove at the imperial villa by the ninth milestone on the Flaminian way sprang from a shoot sent from heaven to Livia Drusilla (Sueton. Galba, i.). Like the olive, the laurel was forbidden to profane use. It was employed in divination; the crackling of its leaves in the sacred flame was a good omen (Tibull. ii. 5. 81), and their silence unlucky (Propert. ii. 21); and the leaves when chewed excited a prophetic afflatus (δαφνηφάγοι, cf. Tibull. ii. 5. 63). There is a poem enumerating the ancient virtues of the laurel by J. Passeratius (1594).
The last of the plants mentioned above under the name of laurel is the so-called spurge laurel (Daphne Laureola). This and one other species (D. Mezereum), the mezereon, are the sole representatives of the family Thymelaeaceae in Great Britain. The spurge laurel is a small evergreen shrub, with alternate somewhat lanceolate leaves with entire margins. The green flowers are produced in early spring, and form drooping clusters at the base of the leaves. The calyx is four-cleft, and carries eight stamens in two circles of four each within the tube. The pistil forms a berry, green at first, but finally black. The mezereon differs in blossoming before the leaves are produced, while the flowers are lilac instead of green. The bark furnishes the drug Cortex Mezerei, for which that of the spurge laurel is often substituted. Both are powerfully acrid, but the latter is less so than the bark of mezereon. It is now only used as an ingredient of the liquor sarsae compositus concentratus. Of other species in cultivation there are D. Fortunei from China, which has lilac flowers; D. pontica, a native of Asia Minor; D. alpina, from the Italian Alps; D. collina, south European; and D. Cneorum, the garland flower or trailing daphne, the handsomest of the hardy species.
See Hemsley’s Handbook of Hardy Trees, &c.
LAURENS, HENRY (1724-1792), American statesman, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on the 24th of February 1724, of Huguenot ancestry. When sixteen he became a clerk in a counting-house in London, and later engaged in commercial pursuits with great success at Charleston until 1771, when he retired from active business. He spent the next three years travelling in Europe and superintending the education of his sons in England. In spite of his strong attachment to England, and although he had defended the Stamp Act, in 1774, in the hope of averting war, he united with thirty-seven other Americans in a petition to parliament against the passing of the Boston Port Bill. Becoming convinced that a peaceful settlement was impracticable, he returned to Charleston at the close of 1774, and there allied himself with the conservative element of the Whig party. He was soon made president of the South Carolina council of safety, and in 1776 vice-president of the state; in the same year he was sent as a delegate from South Carolina to the general continental congress at Philadelphia, of which body he was president from November 1777 until December 1778. In August 1780 he started on a mission to negotiate on behalf of congress a loan of ten million dollars in Holland; but he was captured on the 3rd of September off the Banks of Newfoundland by the British frigate “Vestal,” taken to London and closely imprisoned in the Tower. His papers were found to contain a sketch of a treaty between the United States and Holland projected by William Lee, in the service of Congress, and Jan de Neufville, acting on behalf of Mynheer Van Berckel, pensionary of Amsterdam, and this discovery eventually led to war between Great Britain and the United Provinces. During his imprisonment his health became greatly impaired. On the 31st of December 1781 he was released on parole, and he was finally exchanged for Cornwallis. In June 1782 he was appointed one of the American commissioners for negotiating peace with Great Britain, but he did not reach Paris until the 28th of November 1782, only two days before the preliminaries of peace were signed by himself, John Adams, Franklin and Jay. On the day of signing, however, he procured the insertion of a clause prohibiting the British from “carrying away any negroes or other property of American inhabitants”; and this subsequently led to considerable friction between the British and American governments. On account of failing health he did not remain for the signing of the definitive treaty, but returned to Charleston, where he died on the 8th of December 1792.
His son, John Laurens (1754-1782), American revolutionary officer, was born at Charleston, South Carolina, on the 28th of October 1754. He was educated in England, and on his return to America in 1777, in the height of the revolutionary struggle, he joined Washington’s staff. He soon gained his commander’s confidence, which he reciprocated with the most devoted attachment, and was entrusted with the delicate duties of a confidential secretary, which he performed with much tact and skill. He was present in all Washington’s battles, from Brandywine to Yorktown, and his gallantry on every occasion has gained him the title of “the Bayard of the Revolution.” Laurens displayed bravery even to rashness in the storming of the Chew mansion at Germantown; at Monmouth, where he saved Washington’s life, and was himself severely wounded; and at Coosahatchie, where, with a handful of men, he defended a pass against a large English force under General Augustine Prevost, and was again wounded. He fought a duel against General Charles Lee, and wounded him, on account of that officer’s disrespectful conduct towards Washington. Laurens distinguished himself further at Savannah, and at the siege of Charleston in 1780. After the capture of Charleston by the English, he rejoined Washington, and was selected by him as a special envoy to appeal to the king of France for supplies for the relief of the American armies, which had been brought by prolonged service and scanty pay to the verge of dissolution. The more active co-operation of the French fleets with the land forces in Virginia, which was one result of his mission, brought about the disaster of Cornwallis at Yorktown. Laurens lost no time in rejoining the army, and at Yorktown was at the head of an American storming party which captured an advanced redoubt. Laurens was designated with the vicomte de Noailles to arrange the terms of the surrender, which virtually ended the war, although desultory skirmishing, especially in the South, attended the months of delay before peace was formally concluded. In one of these trifling affairs on the 27th of August 1782, on the Combahee river, Laurens exposed himself needlessly and was killed. Washington lamented deeply the death of Laurens, saying of him, “He had not a fault that I could discover, unless it were intrepidity bordering upon rashness.”
The most valuable of Henry Laurens’s papers and pamphlets including the important “Narrative of the Capture of Henry Laurens, of his Confinement in the Tower of London, &c., 1780, 1781, 1782,” in vol. i. (Charleston, 1857) of the Society’s Collections, have been published by the South Carolina Historical Society. John Laurens’s military correspondence, with a brief memoir by W. G. Simms, was privately printed by the Bradford Club, New York, in 1867.