Prunus lusitanica L.

Horticultural & Botanical History

‘In the Portugal Laurel Prunus lusitanica (Lusitania being an old name for Spain and Portugal) we have one of our largest and handsomest evergreens.  Seen at its best in the sunshine of June, it stands before us as a veritable tree, its shining dark-green leaves, narrower and darker than those of the Common Laurel, gleaming in the sunlight, and its slender spikes of flowers rising straight up from the axils of the leaves and decking it, as it were, with an overdress of dull silver, so numerous, so closely packed are these graceful flower racemes.  It should not be clipped, and above all it should not be crowded if it is to do justice to its great possibilities of beauty.  Given free play and a good situation we have no other evergreen shrub to match it for imposing dignity.  It may be fifty feet high, or it may rank among the shrubs and be merely twice a man’s height.  The flower spikes are none of them borne at the end of the branches as they are in the Common Laurel, but come on the previous year’s wood, and stand quite erect.  The flowers are again of the Rose type for this Laurel, too, belongs to the Rose family, and the fruits are pointed purple berries, much beloved by the birds, who will quickly strip a tree of them.  The Portugal Laurel has no glands on the back of the leaves, and the shrub does not carry the aromatic oils that we find in the Common Laurel.’  [Nuttall – Beautiful flowering Shrubs p.82/1922].

Introduced to Britain in 1648.  [JD]. 

History at Camden Park

Listed in all published catalogues [T.783/1843].

Notes

Prunus lusitanica Gueldenst. ex Ledeb. (1841) = Prunus laurocerasus L.  which see.

Prunus lusitanica Walter (1788) = Prunus caroliniana Ait.