The elm was found in Virginia when the country was first explored, but was probably dispersed, as the references to it are few. A species of laurel tree delighted in the gravelly mould of the damp woodland dells, and blossomed several months without intermission, perfuming the surrounding forest with its delicate odor. The locust, bearing a flower resembling the jesamine, adorned every valley, and in close proximity to it the tulip poplar grew, showing the same proclivity then as now for the moistest and most fertile bottoms in the woods.[1] There was a species of balsam from which there issued a pure and odoriferous gum.[2] The sugar maple was not discovered in Virginia until the settlements had been greatly extended; a company of rangers scouring, in the latter part of the century, the region lying to the west of the Potomac River, whose Indian inhabitants had been threatening serious depredations, accidentally observed a tree from which was distilling a juice that reminded them of molasses, both in sweetness and thickness. This seems to have been the first report of this valuable natural product; but little use was made of it at the time.[3]
Chestnut trees were as numerous in the vicinity of the Falls of the Powhatan as the most ordinary species of oak, and in size and flavor the nuts were pronounced to be equal to the nuts of the same trees in Spain, France, Germany, and Italy, by those among the early colonists who had visited these countries.[4] The chinquapin, which still
- ↑ Beverley’s History of Virginia, p. 111.
- ↑ Works of Capt John Smith, p. 58.
- ↑ Beverley’s History of Virginia, p. 108.
- ↑ Ralph Hamor’s True Discourse, p. 23. Works of Capt. John Smith, p. 56.
abundance there. The sassafras in the present age is generally of secondary growth in the valley of the James. It is quite probable that the tree, when Virginia was first explored, was found in the thickest array in the old Indian fields.
