A garden should sometimes look to its laurels

Press, 21 September 1978, Page 12

A garden should sometimes look to its laurels

I have just planted, from an old garden, a seedling of a very handsome foliage shrub, the Portugal laurel, and I wonder why it is not seen more often. Its name is Prunus lusitanica, and in time it makes an imposing evergreen plant, especially in early summer, when it covers itself with lOin

panicles of white flowers. True, it makes a very large shrub eventually, and the parent of my seedling, in the garden of a very old homestead built perhaps in the 1850 s, must be 20ft high and as much across.

But this does not happen overnight, and if what a friend calls “judicious pruning” is practised it is possible to enjoy its glossy, evergreen leaves and reddish twigs for 10 or 15 years, or more, before size becomes a problem.

Why is it called a laurel? I do not know. But our forefathers were very free with this word, and splashed it around mercilessly among evergreen shrubs.

The ultimate derivation is an ancient Celtic word, "laur,” meaning a green leaf, and at least eight evergreens have “laurel” in their common names.

They include that estimable and familiar (which is another way of saying dull) plant, the Japanese

laurel, Aucuba, in both plain and spotted forms; two splendid North American ericaceous shrubs, Kalmia angustifolia, the “sheep-laurel” or “lambkill,” and Kalmia latifolia, the “mountain laurel,” and the common cherry laurels. There are three of these, one from North America and the others from countries touching on the Mediterranean. Prunus laurocerasus, the well-known hedge laurel, is one of those plants that are better than most people think they are. If left alone for 50 years or so, it grows into a most handsome tree. But none of these is a true laurel. That honour is reserved for the sweetbay, Laurus nobilis, and other members of the family, Lauraceae. Most members of this family grow into trees, nearly all, if not all, are aromatic, and many are important in commerce. One of them is Persea americana, the avocado; and others are Cinnamomum camphora, the camphor tree; C. cassia, the cassia-tree; and C. zeylanicum, the cinnamontree. Whereas it is the leaves of the sweet-bay that enliven soups and stews, it is the bark of cassia and cinnamon that brightens biscuits. Laurus nobilis, which ha!

various names including sweet-bay, Alexandrian laurel, and poet’s laurel, has been cultivated for a long, long time. As usually seen it is a glossy evergreen with stiff, aromatic, spearheadshaped leaves. A vareity, “Angustifolia,” has smaller, narrower leaves, and there is said also

to be a variegated form, though I have never seen it and doubt if it is in New Zealand. Another form, which grows in some Cashmere gardens (a friend has given me a seedling, and I am waiting for spring eventually to arrive so that I can plant it out) has a crinkled, almost crenellated, margin on the leaves. Usually the sweet-bay is seen as a bushy, round-head-ed shrub, frequently clipped over to provide leaves for the pot. If left alone, it grows into a stately tree, and there are a few in old gardens in Christchurch. The sweet-bay has long had a reputation of being beneficial to health and

happiness, and once was used to decorate houses and churches at Christmas. The ancient Greeks and Romans dedicated it to Apollo and Aesculapius, god of medicine. The old English herbalists used it to treat a wide range of ailments, from bee stings to rheumatism. Culpeper wrote that the berries “do help the consumption, old coughs, shortness of breath, and thin rheums, as also the megrim. They mightily expel the wind, and provoke urine; help the mother, and kill the worms.” In less practical terms, the bay tree, whose leaves made the victor’s laurel wreath of Greece, has always been seen as a symbol of sucess and a protection against evil. Culpeper wrote:" , . .It is a tree of the sun and under the celestial sign of Leo, and resisteth witchcraft very potently, as also all the evils old Saturn can do the body of man, and they are not a few; for it is the speech of one, and I am mistaken if it were not Mizaldus, that neither witch nor devil, thunder nor lightning, will hurt a man where a bay tree is.” Modem man puts his faith in lightning conductors instead of leaves, but a superstition survives that has its origin in these old beliefs: that when a bay tree dies, disaster is in the offing.