Avon Willows

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32073, 22 August 1969, Page 10

Avon Willows

Sir, —In his book, “The Bonapartes,” David Stacton writes: “On the 9th, the Emperor was buried ... under some weeping willows and beside a favourite spring. . . . The willows were stripped for cuttings as souvenirs (the

banks of the Avon, at Christchurch, in New Zealand, are lined with willows grown from cuttings of these trees.”) Can any.of your readers tell me by whom they were planted and when? Surely there should be a plaque on Park Terrace to commemorate the occasion, and to tell us that the willows came from Napoleon’s grave in St Helena. —Yours, etc..

August 19, 1969. [The Canterbury Public Library says that, according to W. E. M. Jacobson’s “Akaroa and Banks Peninsula, 1840 to 1940,” published in 1940, a Mr Le Lievre, who had a whare at Akaroa, introduced the first willows to Canterbury about 1840. He cut two slips from a tree overshadowing the grave of Napoleon on St Helena, and planted one outside his whare and the second at German Bay. The Avon willows were later propagated from these two trees, the book says. But another book, L. N. M. Hale’s “Pioneer Nurserymen Of New Zealand,” published in 1955, says that an early nurseryman known as “Cabbage” Wilson was responsible for planting the Avon willows in 1864 with cuttings he introduced from Wellington.]