The World of Napoleon's Willows

The willows weeping over Napoleon's grave in St Helena achieved iconic status in the imagery and writing about the island in the 19th century. Sketches and prints of the scene ranged from the realistic to the romantic, the latter including a fanciful sub-genre depicting the emperor's silhouette hidden between the trunks of the trees at the grave.

One of the more conventional images of Napoleon's grave: 'The Tomb of Bonaparte', hand-coloured etching and aquatint by Thomas Sutherland, after a drawing by Captain Frederick Marryat, 1821. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

A Dutch version of the shade of Napoleon watching over his grave: 'Graf van Napoleon op Sint-Helena' by Roelof van der Meulen, 1831, courtesy of The Rijksmuseum, Ref. RP-P-OB-29.234.

But these trees had a chequered life. In 1848, a visitor to St Helena reported that souvenir hunters routinely stripped their leaves and branches till they were mere stumps, each time being replaced by new slips grown from the originals. These souvenir cuttings were replanted far and wide across the British Empire, from Canada to Australia and New Zealand. No doubt other countries had offshoots as well.

Report from the Illustrated London News, 30 December 1848, on the state of Napoleon's grave.

Napoleon's grave in St Helena, as shown in the Illustrated London News, 30 December 1848. The tree stump at one end is said to be one of the original willows, long since denuded of its leaves by souvenir hunters.

In Britain, offshoot trees were said to grace the Bishop's Palace Garden in Chichester; the grounds of Westminster Abbey; Woodbridge in Suffolk (axed to make way for a new county school in 1909); a farmhouse in Coldharbour Lane, Hildenbrough; and at Icklesham, near Rye. One of the finest of the reputed offshoots was the magnificent willow that used to adorn the Neptune Fountain in Cheltenham.

The old willow at the Neptune Fountain in Cheltenham, c. 1910 - said to be one of the offshoot trees from Napoleon's grave on St Helena.

If you'd like to learn more about the spread of Napoleon's willows around the globe, tune in to Dr Ekatarina Heath's talk at Sydney University on Wednesday, 20 August on Napoleon in Australia: Collections, Memory, and Living Monuments. The willows feature prominently, travelling to Australia 'as living souvenirs [and] planted in places of civic pride, political symbolism, and private commemoration... We trace their journeys from St Helena to Australian gardens and back, revealing how these ‘Napoleonic willows’ served as living instruments for shaping imperial memory, national identity, and even post‑WWII diplomacy.'

Click on the link for more information and details of how to join the talk by Zoom: https://t.e2ma.net/message/kgra89g/8ippo9qd