A Brief (and very dubious) History of Chewing Gum

I was passing some wild cherry trees in Weardale this afternoon and noticed this ball of solidified gum exuded from a damaged branch of one of them. Prunus species tend to do this if they're wounded – plum and cherry trees in particular are prone to exude gum if they’re wounded. 

I vaguely remembered that this gum is supposed to be edible and when I got home checked it out in some early natural history books. Curiously the notion of its edibility seems to be based on the same original account,repeated more or less verbatim in books from the 18^th., 19^th., and 20^th. Century (plagiarism has always been rife in natural history writing). It goes as follows:

‘Hasselquist relates that more than a hundred men, during a siege, were kept alive for near two months without any other sustenance than a little of this gum taken into the mouth sometimes, and suffered gradually to dissolve’.

That comes from William Withering’s 1776 treatise called A Botanical Arrangement of all the Vegetables Naturally growing in Great Britain..., which was the oldest source I could lay my hands on.

So who was the mysterious Hasselquist, who seems to be the original source of this persistently plagiarised information? It turns out that Fredrik Hasselquist (1722-1752), a Swede, was a contemporary of Linnaeus who travelled extensively in the Middle East during his all-to-short life.

I couldn’t find the original source of Withering’s quote on the web but did find another, even more improbable, account by Hasselquist of the miraculous nutritional qualities of chewing gum.

It comes fronm his book entitled Voyages and Travels in the Levant in the years 1749, 50, 51, 52, containing observations in natural history, physick, agriculture and commerce, particularly on the Holy Land, and the natural history of the Scriptures. Remarkably, its available to read on the web, here, courtesy of Google books.

In this passage he’s referring to gum Arabic rather than Prunus gum, but for gum chewers everywhere it's reassurance that, if you are caught in a difficult situation, salvation may come through mastication.

‘The Abyssinians make a journey to Cairo every year, to sell the products of their country......They must travel over terrible deserts ... the necessities of life may chance to fail them when the journey lasts too long. This happened to the Abyssinian caravan in the year 1750, when provisions being consumed, when they had still two months to travel... they were obliged to search for something amongst their merchandise, wherewith they might support life in this extremity, and found nothing more proper that gum Arabic. This served to support above 1000 persons for two months ... the caravan arrived safe in Cairo, without any great loss of people either by hunger or diseases’. 

Improbable maybe, but I've seen more outrageous claims made in the popular press about purported benefits of health foods.....

Meawhile, back to cherry trees - and you can read about their beautifully fragrant wood at this excellent new blog.

A Tree-Spotter's Guide to Buds: part 4

Aspen Populus tremula twigs are tipped with these sharply pointed buds that sometimes have a slight stickiness about their bud scales. This is quite common in poplar species and is most pronounced in balsam poplars, where the resin that's responsible has a wonderful fragrance. Poplars have a tendency to hybridise, sometimes making identification tricky, but aspen is easy to identify when it's in leaf because of a peculiarity of the leaf stalks; they're flattened from side to side, so the leaves tremble from side to side in the slightest breeze - hence the Latin epithet tremula. They also turn a wonderful shade of lemon yellow in autumn, and the sight of a whole tree of lemon yellow foliage trembling in the wind is something to behold.

Apple Malus domestica buds are blunt and downy, with few bud scales. The knobbly, scarred twigs have a character all of their own, especially........

...in old trees that have acquired their own epiphytic flora of lichens. Old orchards, now fast disappearing, are wonderful resources for people and wildlife and their cause has been vigorously championed by that admirable organisation Common Ground - see http://www.commonground.org.uk/

Most hedgerow apples are likely to be descendants of discarded cores of domesticated apples, rather than the native crab apple Malus sylvestris

The buds on the main twigs of wild cherry or gean Prunus avium are not particularly distinctive but a little way down the twig from these you'll find....

... the fruiting spurs that will carry those clusters of dazzling white flowers in spring - and in summer the cherries. Over the last couple of years I've tasted quite a lot of wild cherries and this particular tree bears unusually juicy and large deep red fruits, that make excellent cherry sauce for pouring over ice cream. Unfortunately, someone else has made the same discovery and this year raided all the low branches on the tree before I could get to it. All I can say is that I hope they suffered the same fate as the badger that had over-endulged in the fallen fruits: the ground nearby carried the purplish-red telltale signs of a badger with a severe stomach upset, along with a mass of cherry stones that had passed unharmed through its digestive system.

Sallow (aka pussy willow aka goat willow) Salix caprea carries green buds with no apparent bud scales, The single scale that sheaths the whole bud deepen in colour through the winter, taking on a brownnish hue, and when the leaf and flower tissue inside swells in spring the whole covering is shrugged off.

For part 3 see http://cabinetofcuriosities-greenfingers.blogspot.com/2009/12/tree-spotters-guide-to-buds-part-3.html

For more posts on tree ID click here