THE TRAVELS OF TREES

Waipa Post, Volume 34, Issue 2033, 16 July 1927, Page 3

THE TRAVELS OF TREES

Trees travel about the world far more than most people imagine. Only recently Kew Gardens sent out a collection of oaks, -willows, chestnuts, elms, beeches, and alders to be planted by the Duke and Duchess of York, the Governor-General and the Prime Minister at the opening of the new Australian Parliament at Canberra.

It is expected that slips from them

_ will be distributed in the S, course'of time (says a Botanist in the Mail"). - ■ Many are the descendants, in various countries, Of that famous weeping willow that was planted over the grave of Napoleon on St. Helena. Some are "children" and some are "grandchildren." A West Norwood resident has two of the latter, and among the other English specimens are a "child" at Broxbourne Mill and another at Exeter. Hundreds of young oaks from acorns brought from cape colony are growing between the Longueval-Gin-chy road and the ridge, in Delville Wood, enveloping the war memorial to South. African soldiers who fell in France during the Great War. Walnuts from the tree overhanging the , grave of President Roosevelt at Oyster Bay^. Long Island were sent over to our Boy Scout organisation'for cultivation in Britain, not long ago, by tae scouts of America.

A little known tree" from afar is the

Persian rose over the grave at Woodbridge, near Ipswich, of Fitzgerald. It was raised from a seed brought to England by a traveller from the actual tomb of Omar Khayyam, at Nishapur.

The London County Council and the municipal authorities of Tokio exchanged hundreds of trees about a year ago. A hundred little oaks were among those which we sent out to Japan, and some 60 sorts of cherry and plum formed part of the gift to us. The London County Council

passed on many of the trees to botanic gafdens at Oxford, Kew, Dublin, Edinburgh and elsewhere. Trees sent out by Kew, some 75 years ago, have clothed the bare isle of Ascension with verdure, and only recently the Gardens dispatched, by the new chaplain to Tristan da Cunha a quantity of fast growing willows and poplars for establishing groves that will provide timber of. the remote community on that Isolated speck of our Empire. A steady stream of trees is always flowing into'Kew from all parts of the world, and thousands of rhododendrons have travelled to us by sea from the ports of south-eastern Asia, whithey they were brought by explorers for rare plants in the mountain valleys of Upper Burma and Yunnan.

Millions of trees' in Britain are immigrants which first saw light of day abroad. Five hundred years ago we had no sweet chestnut trees. The giants you win find in Rickmansworth Park, were brought back, as young sters, from Spain, by our Elizabethan travellers.

It is. in Cornish soil that most of our travelled trees have, taken root. In the frost-free gardens of that fair peninsula thrive palms from many a warm climate; eucalypti from Australia, tree-ferns from New Zealand, mimosa from South Africa, winterflowering rhododendrons from Southern China, and a host of other exotics.

No official records exist of many a" grove of queer trees brought home, as striplings a few inches high by men and women who have spent years abroad, in business or administrative exile. Wherever the British wander, too, they carry their own flowers and trees. In Hong Kong and Shanghai are hundreds of British-born trees. Yes; trees certainly do. travel.