I can add to what Victor has said on the
subject that there is also a mention of racemosa (my favorite tree, by the
way) in Speak, Memory (you can easily find it via the Index). In
"Drugie berega" (Chapter Three, 4) one finds imeni bezumnogo
Batyushkova mlechnaya cheryumukha ("milky racemosa of mad
Batyushkov's fame").
Besedka muz ("Bower of Muses", 1817), the
most famous poem of Konstantin Batyushkov (1787-1855), the poet who was to
go mad in the early 1820s, begins with the lines:
Pod teniyu cheryomukhi
mlechnoy
I zolotom blistayushchikh
akatsiy
("In the shade of milky racemosas
and golden-glistening pea trees",
as Nabokov renders them in the Commentary to
his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin; vol. 3, p.
13)
Racemosa is a tree that can walk. See Leo Tolstoy's
piece Kak khodyat derev'ya ("How the trees walk").
Alexey Sklyarenko