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| Saturday, August 12, 2000 |
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UNLIKE other trees which grow upwards, the slender and long branches of weeping willows droop downwards. In fact, the beautiful cascades of weeping willows have been likened to the flowing down of one’s tears. Commonly grown in graveyards and, therefore, called "graveyard trees", the weeping willows give shade to the graves below them. This is why the trees have acquired their unusual but poetic name. Some of the weeping willow trees growing around Shimla ... wafting in the pine-scented breeze ... have a tale to tell ... of their origin ... of another time... of another place .... being linked to Napoleon Bonaparte, France’s renowned adventurer-turned-general-turned-emperor.
Here in St. Helena, Napoleon spent the last years of his life as a sick lonely man, quite forgotten by the world till death came to him in 1821, which was "no longer an event, merely a bit of news." Napoleon was given a simple burial in St. Helena’s Rupert Valley, where he had sometimes gone on lone walks. His body was laid to rest in a "grave .... dug in a secluded valley beside a spring shaded by two weeping willows", thus wrote Emil Ludwig in his thick biography entitled Napoleon. He also states that only the name "Napoleon" was inscribed on the stone slabs, whereas some historians opine that his tomb bore no name, only the words ci-git (here lies). |
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Later in his honour, a third weeping willow tree was grown there by Dr Barry O’Meara, an Irish-born English naval officer, who used to attend to the medical needs of Napoleon in St. Helena. Around this time, Dr Barry O’Meara’s nephew, namely A.O. Meara, happened to be living in Shimla. He was a renowned dental surgeon of the British Indian summer capital of Shimla, who had once extracted the teeth of Abdur Rehman, the Amir of Afghanistan. Dr Barry O’Meara sent several cuttings from the weeping willows planted by him at Napoleon’s grave to his nephew in Shimla. These cuttings travelled all the way from the tiny St. Helena around the circuitous Cape of Good Hope, then across the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea and finally by land, to be planted in the strange environment of Indian soil in Shimla. Soon after the cuttings took root to eventually grow into beautiful weeping willows. S. Edward J. Buck writes in his Simla Past and Present, "Consequently several real St. Helena weeping willows trees may now be seen growing in and around Simla." Weeping willows were grown at Chadwick Falls (Summer Hill), Ravenswood (now High Court), Kenilworth and Sherwood (now Faridkot House, Mashobra), Bentick Castle (now Grand Hotel) and elsewhere too. These trees were further multiplied. "The ones at Sherwood and Kenilworth were propagated from cuttings taken from a tree which once stood at the entrance to Bentick Castle", says Edward J. Buck. In 1840 i.e. 19 years after Napoleon’s demise, his body was dug out from his grave and the weeping willow trees were removed to be "replaced by cypress and pine grown by the French and the English" and Napoleon was give a magnificent burial "on the banks of the Sienne, in the midst of the French people", in accordance with his last wishes. But that is another story. Botanically called Salix Babylonica and originally hailing from China and South West Asia (not to be confused with the Biblical ones), weeping willows are deciduous trees, that thrive in wet and poorly drained places. In winter their shoots have a tinge of yellow. Grown as ornamental and shady trees, weeping willows are used for landscaping the gardens, especially near water points. Salicin is extracted from its bark which is used as a febrifuge and pain-reliever. Clay tablets from the Sumerian period described the use of willow leaves to treat rheumatism. The Egyptians too used them for aches and swellings. Around 400 BC,Hippocrates used a brew of willow leaves to ease the pain of childbirth. The new Encyclopaedia Britannica states, "The important household medicine aspirin is a derivative of salicylic acid" (which is obtained from salicin). Weeping willows are also commercially used for making pulp, basketware and bats. |
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After the debacle at
Waterloo, the once formidable Napolean was taken as the famous
"Prisoner of Europe", to be permanently exiled to the remote
and storm-swept British island of St. Helena in the vast Atlantic
waters, off the shore of West Africa. It was aptly described by
Napoleon as "a little rock at the world’s end."