The genus is named in honour of Jean Robin, a French botanist, whose son cultivated the first specimens of _R. pseudacacia_ in Europe.
One of the most pleasing in growth of our forest trees is the Ash, its grey trunk rising to eighty or a hundred feet, and its sweeping branches, the lower ones bending upwards at the tips, clothed with the gracefully curving long pinnate leaves. The character of these compound leaves and their leaflets is well shown in our illustration, together with two clusters of the winged fruits.
The Ash is a native of Britain, although most of the specimens we meet in woods and plantations have been reared in a nursery and planted out. There are many cultivated varieties of _F. excelsior_; and a large number of species have been introduced during the present and last centuries, chiefly from S. Europe and N. America. Ash and Privet are the only native representatives of the order Oleaceæ, to which the Olive belongs. It cannot be said that _Fraxinus excelsior_ is a typical representative of the order, since most species included in it bear flowers composed of all the floral organs, whereas _excelsior_ has neither calyx nor corolla. Its flowers appear in April or May, and are of three kinds:--staminate, consisting of two dark purple stamens only; pistillate, consisting of an oblong ovary with short style and cleft stigma; hermaphrodite, consisting of ovary and two anthers with very short filaments. These flowers are individually small and inconspicuous, but associated as they are in dense panicles from the new wood formed in the previous season, and appearing before the black leaf-buds have burst; they are collectively very conspicuous. The leaves are very late in making their appearance, as they are among the first to fall after the early frosts of autumn. The “keys,” as the fruits are called, each contain two seeds, and the wing has a twist which causes the key to spin rapidly when the breeze separates it from the bunch and carries it far from the parent tree.
It may surprise some of our readers to learn that the Mulberry-tree is not a native, though it is a familiar object in old gardens and parks. It is generally stated that the first Mulberry-trees were introduced in 1548 and planted at Syon House, Isleworth (then the Convent of St. Bridget of Zion), but the Duke of Northumberland is credited with saying early in the present century that he could then trace them back quite three hundred years. Several of this batch are still living, and one--probably the finest old Mulberry in England--is a hale and vigorous ornament to Mr. George Manville Fenn’s lawn at Syon Lodge. Mr. Leo Grindon is of opinion that the tree was originally introduced by the Romans, for he finds that the Saxons had a name for it, which would probably not have been the case had it not been growing in their midst.