The Nature of Eureka

By
Steven Foster
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761
Black Locust, Robinia pseudoacacia found in dry woods in Eastern North America is widely planted as an ornamental tree elsewhere. American Indians chewed root bark to induce vomiting. held bark in mouth to allay toothaches. A folk tonic, purgative, emetic. Flower tea used for rheumatism. In China the root bark is also considered purgative and emetic and the flowers are considered diuretic. Flowers contain a glycoside, robinin, which is experimentally diuretic. All plant parts with potential toxicity.

Black Locust – A weedy gift from America

Those interested in native plants are often obsessed with invasive aliens, mostly horticultural or useful plant introductions, along with opportunistic, easy-to-adapt plant species from Europe and Asia. A native tree is blooming now, with either white or pinkish, sweetly fragrant flowers, that attracted the attention of the earliest European explorers of the early modern era to American shores. It is our common black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), which turns fair play in the opposite direction. Not only is it blooming in Eureka Springs, it’s also flowering along streets in Paris and London and much of eastern Asia, while dormant during South Africa’s autumn. This native Ozark tree is listed as a noxious weed in Europe and elsewhere.

The tree only blooms for a week or two in spring, with pendulous bunches of pea-like flowers. The heady fragrance was blamed for inducing nausea and headaches, though that accusation has the odor of a swooning Victorian suffering from unrequited love. The species name became pseudoacacia or false acacia, once thought to resemble the acacias of Egypt. The genus name Robinia, honors Jean Robin (1550-1629), gardener to Henry IV, King of France. It is known that his son, Vespasian Robin (1579-1662), gardener to Louis XIII, planted it in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris in 1635. In the same year, John Tradescant received seeds in England, where the tree thrived and grew rapidly.

Black locust was first described in detail in one of the great 17th-century English herbals, John Parkinson’s Theatrum Botanicum (Theatre of Plants) published in 1640. By the 1660s our woodland waif was widely planted as a street tree throughout Paris and London. The love affair continues more than 400 years later.

Go almost anywhere in Europe or temperate Asia today, and the “Virginia acacia” – our black locust – is widely planted as a street tree, and appears as if part of the native landscape, which it now is as an invasive alien. In his Sylva Florifera, (1823), Henry Phillips, tell us that American Indians make a declaration of love by presenting a branch of this tree in blossom to the object of their attachment. No doubt our native black locust itself was the object of desire. “Of all exotic trees,” Phillips writes, “with which we have adorned our native groves, this North American stands first.”