was the richest scene I ever saw. A rushing river running deep
down between high banks, covered with a tangle of huge bamboos,
palms, tree-ferns, bread-fruit, bananas, and papaw trees, matted
together with creepers, every individual plant seeming finer
and fresher than other specimens of the same sort, and the
larger such plants were, the grander their curves. Then they
had the most exquisite little basket-work dwellings hidden away
amongst them, and in the distance was a bamboo bridge--a sort
of magnified human spider’s web. Looking straight along the
street from the bridge was another pretty view--little shops
full of gaily coloured things, such as scarlet jamboa fruit,
yellow bananas, pomelas, melons, pines, and hot peppers of the
brightest reds and greens. Pretty birds in bamboo cages, people
in every shade of purple, scarlet, pink, turquoise blue, emerald
green, and lemon yellow; small copper-coloured children carrying
all their garments on the tops of their heads, grass-cutters
carrying inverted cones of green fastened to their bamboos and
almost hiding them. Long avenues of huge banyan trees bordered
the principal drive to the palace, with large bird’s-nest ferns
growing on their branches, each tree forming a small plantation
of itself, with its hanging roots and offsets from the branches.
Herds of spotted deer used to rest in the shade under these
trees, and parties of the great crested ground pigeon, as big as
turkeys, were always to be found there.
[Illustration: THE PALM HOUSE]
The Botanic Garden near Rio de Janeiro, also, has tropical features
we can hardly match, such as its colonnade of palms, a living temple
overtopping the suburban avenues in which tram lines have been planted
by foreign capital. Then the Gardens of Peradenia in Ceylon gather such
a bouquet of choice flora as an enraptured traveller compares to “the
paradise of some Eastern tale, designed and inhabited by invisible
genii.” Our Australian colonies, so well off for sun, if not for water,
are undertaking to show the Old Country what can be done in this way by
children freed from some of her disadvantages. Sydney, besides its rich
Botanic Gardens, can afford to keep stretches of wild scenery preserved
in all their unkempt luxuriance; and behind Melbourne Nature itself has a
giant grove of gum-trees, rising from the undergrowth of ferns that with
us would rank as tall trees. And, of course, in many other parts of the
world, comparatively little expense can bring together a collection of
our rare and delicate blooms, there ranking as weeds.
We are better off for money and skill, that at Kew have done so much to
acclimatise or safeguard the productions of more favoured climes. What
may be called the heart of the Gardens, on the side towards the Richmond
road, is the Great Palm House, hardly great enough, as from time to
time some of its pushing guests have to be turned out or snuffed down
for fear of their prising off the roof. This huge hothouse enshrines a
medley collection of tropical forms, grand and graceful, brought together
from Africa, Asia, America and Polynesia, getting their fill of heat
and moisture, if not of sunshine. One guide-book says that almost every
variety of palms is represented in the exotic jumble, which is rather too
much to say, as their species are counted by hundreds, about a hundred
in the woods of the Amazon alone. The most striking trees here, looking
ill at ease in the confinement of their tubs, are specimens of the
pandanus or screw-pine, with its sword-like leaves and its stilt-like
roots, propping the top in the air “with its trunk hid for repairs, as
it were, among an enclosure of scaffolding.” Young and eupeptic visitors
will inquire for the coco-nut, whose fruit reaches them only in a dry,
curdled, shrunken state, poorly representing its fibrous green globes
filled with soft butter and refreshing milk. The double coco-nut of the
Seychelles to be seen here is only a distant relation, whose nuts, like a
pair of giant’s boxing-gloves joined together, grow “full of white jelly,
enough to fill the largest soup-tureen.” It was one of General Gordon’s
crotchets to regard this as the forbidden fruit of Eden; but at Kew, Eve
could surely have found apples more tempting of aspect--for example, the
Japanese date-plum in the Succulent House. One must not, however, attempt
a catalogue of all the vegetable strangers coaxed and coddled to grow
in an asylum, which might have taken a larger scale had a proposal been
carried out to transfer the Crystal Palace to Kew rather than to Norwood.
Near the Palm House stands the Tropical Lily House, where now the
Victoria Regia should open in July its huge white flowers tinged with
royal red. This queen of water-lilies, that first flowered in Britain
at Chatsworth, has to content itself here with a tank, as an exiled
sovereign may have to come down to hotel lodgings; but in its native
Guiana, it blocks up canals and spangles lake swamps opening in the
flowery woods. The leaves are often as broad as a man’s height, with
upturned rims, so that Indian women can cradle their children upon them
safely while the mother does her washing in the river fringed with such
weeds of truly “glorious feature.” In the same conservatory, among other
water-plants, are the papyrus reeds among which Moses was set floating,
in our day crowded out of fertile Egypt, but they are found growing
lustily so near as Sicily; while their old economic importance, that
naturalised the name in our language, has dwindled now that we can turn
wood-pulp into cheap paper.
I lately found the Victoria Regia enthroned in this, its original
nursery; but a guide-book locates it in what, I understand, was its
quarters for a time, the group of hot-houses numbered from seven to
thirteen, which stand not far from the Cumberland Gate entrance. They
have a show of other aquatic plants, and freaks of Nature like the
pitcher-plants and living fly-traps, able to feed themselves on insects
lured to their intoxicating cups that act upon the drugged victim
like the digestive organs of an animal. Here are billeted the delicate
orchids, living on moist warm air, which in our day have been brought to
flower in succession all through the year, even by electric light under
the smoky glass of Birmingham, sought out for our hothouses so diligently
that in their tropical wilds some of the richest sorts begin to grow
rare, while of a thousand specimens gained perhaps at the cost of felling
as many trunks, but a few may survive the trying journey, at the end of
which is worth more than its weight in gold what ran wild as a parasite
weed in the tree-tops of the Magdalena or the Orinoco.
This group of hot-houses cools off into a conservatory of South African
plants, containing potted heaths such as bloom over vast stretches of
Karroo, along with specimens of the curious Japanese art of dwarfing
trees. For a contrast to these nurseries of tender exotics, one might
turn to the Rock Garden beside them, towards the Cumberland Gate, where
Alpine and other hardy growths thrive in a hollow set with rockery
supplied by the destruction of one or more of those fanciful structures
of the Georgian age that still dot the grounds here and there--Temple
of Æolus, Temple of the Sun, and so forth. Beyond the Rock Garden
lies the Herbaceous Ground’s gathering of homely plants; and at its
entrance, overshadowed by Museum II., a little Alpine House accommodates
Nature’s hardy dwarfs, needing no such costly shelter as her tropical
Brobdignagians.
But we have not yet done with the hothouses. Just beyond the egress of
the South African _annexe_, another group begins with the Succulent
House, holding a store of fleshy, scaly, spiky and prickly forms of the
cactus and aloe tribes, having so many odd uses, as the “vegetable cows”
milked three times a day in Mexico, that their juice may be fermented
into the national thin tipple _pulque_, tasting like buttermilk with a
dash of sulphur, while the root of another aloe yields _mezcal_ as a
stronger drink. One American cactus is not so carefully cultivated as it
once was to rear the cochineal insect that dyed “England’s cruel red,”
now procured more cheaply from aniline dyes first made under the group
of tall chimneys below Harrow Hill. In South Africa aloes grow almost
as tall as chimney stacks, so it would take the British Museum dome
to house them. This indeed is not the same plant as the American aloe,
better distinguished as the agave, whose flowering stem may rise to the
height of half a dozen men, so here we must be content with miniature
specimens to fit the Succulent House. Beside this collection stands a
greenhouse glowing with bloom inside panes dimmed by frosty fog; then
beyond open smaller nurseries of tropical and filmy ferns. Outside, here,
is supported a huge wistaria, once wreathing the walls of a conservatory
now removed.
Last comes, what may be visited first, as its Grecian front almost faces
the main entrance, the Aroid House, describable as a chapel of ease to
the Palm House, close packed with a smaller congregation of swollen
greenery, sucking in the edifying moisture that congeals on the glassy
walls, and blinds for a minute or two one’s spectacled eyes, suddenly
brought from the atmosphere of our zone to that of the Equator.
From such artificial snuggeries it seems doubly dismal to turn out into
the raw air of a truly British November, in which a few forlorn roses may
still be struggling to hold up their faded heads, and dank evergreens
wear hardly a more cheerful aspect than the sere leaves, “last of their
clan,” that flutter down to be swept off the glistening grass. And yet
those representatives of another climate, so carefully gathered and
preserved, give but a poor idea of the teeming wildernesses that know
no change of season but from baking heat to swamping rain, their rank
vegetation always glowing under the breath of a fierce spring, while
decaying in everlasting autumn beneath the richest mantles, and if there
be any winter it is the daily frost of paralysing heat. The tropics come
more truly before us in descriptions such as one might quote from a score
of eloquent travellers, for example this by an American writer, W. H.
Hurlbut:--
The wastes of Northern Cuba are jungles of closely twining
plants, gay with the myriad hues of strange, magnificent flowers,
and overtopped by gigantic trees, whose trunks are not less gay
with fantastic embroideries, and from whose Briarean arms hang
countless veils and fringes of creeping plants, the names of
which cause upon the ear the same indefinite impression of savage
magnificence that is made by their blended, indistinguishable
forms upon the eye. All things which to us of the temperate zones
are creatures of boxes and bales, creations, we might perhaps as
truly say, of the merchant and the grocer, meet us here at every
turn, wild and bold in the woods; the fan-like cacao tree, the
spreading vanilla, the parasite tamarind, the gaunt and desolate
guava. The cactus no longer struggles for existence in the feeble
sunshine of a three-pair back window with a southern exposure,
but, swollen to the size of a scrub oak, impedes your way with
its dull, hideous, prickly leaves, and flaunts its great flowers
in your face. You may cure your thirst by day with the sweet
clear waters of the cocoa-nut. You may cool your heated eyes by
night with such floods of golden moonlight as would have driven
Shelley mad. The moon, which gives expression to the most tedious
landscape and the most unmeaning face, and converts the delight
of gazing upon beauty into a kind of frenzy, the moon makes all
men Endymions in Cuba.
[Illustration: THE GREEN HOUSE]
But if, amid hints and samples of such luxuriance, the well-clad visitor
feels his spirit “falter in the mist” and be inclined to “languish for
the purple seas” of the South, let him consider how with a certain relief
he escapes from the damp, dripping, sticky heat of these glass-houses
into our untempered breezes, a little exercise soon setting his blood
in tune with a climate that from the cradle goads one to be always
doing something, if only throwing stones, that here would be a most
objectionable pastime for our versatile youth. It is the sons of a
temperate zone who are stirred into building palm houses or setting out
to hunt for treasures of the tropics, when tired of hunting in play
wild animals kept for the purpose at home. As further comfort, let a
stay-at-home study the reports of travellers to note how soon they
grow sick of tropical glare and glow, of the crude and garish tints
of rank evergreenery, of the “chromo-lithograph midsummer” that wants
tenderness, sweetness, variety, and contrast, of the endless monotonies
of shade and the blinding dazzle of perpetual sunshine chequered by a
“scorched darkness” that brings no rest--how they sigh for refreshing
showers that come in their season as a devastating deluge, for weeks and
months together turning into feverish mud the choking dust and the soil
cracked as if gasping for breath, where masterful Nature, if at least
she knows her own mind, is always in violent extremes. I was once in a
desert oasis when it had the prodigious experience of a wet day, not in
bursts of storm but in gently dropping rain, and I shall never forget
the satisfaction with which the natives turned out to bask in weather so
familiar to us as to be hardly worth grumbling at.
I, too, have peeped into those stifling Arcadias, and have known what it
is to hail a “mango shower” or a sea breeze. But I quote for high and
wide authority a Ulysses indeed, Dr. A. R. Wallace, who after years spent
in the richest regions on both sides of the world, can tell us that the
luscious shows picked into a nosegay in our hot-houses ill counterfeit
those natural jungles where blossoms are drowned in a flood of sombre
green, and the brightest flowers, climbing upwards in the universal
struggle for light, waste their full blown beauty on the parching sky,
invisible to the wanderer, unless in an airship he could surmount the
lofty roof of foliage beneath which he may have to push and hew his
tunnelled way through obstruction of dense underwood. This explorer
declares that he has wandered for days in tropical forests without coming
on any bloom so gay as a hawthorn or a honeysuckle; and he has never seen
in Brazil or Malaysia “such brilliant masses of colour as even England
can show in her furze-clad commons, her heathery mountain-sides, her
glades of wild hyacinth, her fields of poppies, her meadows of buttercups
and daisies.”
Sir E. Im Thurn bears out Wallace’s view with some qualification: “At no
time is the Guiana leafage as splendid as in an ordinary English wood
either in the early spring or in the glorious golden autumn time. But on
the other hand, the tropical forest throughout the year is more variously
coloured … due partly to the fact that without special season for the
bursting or the fall of the leaves, throughout the year it has trees both
putting out new leaves, white, or brilliantly tinted with green, pink,
or red, and others from which drop leaves with red, yellow, and bronze
colours burned deeply into them by the blazing sun; and partly to the
fact that in it trees of innumerable kinds, each with foliage slightly
distinct in colour, grow intermingled.… The whole amount of colour
afforded by flowers is probably not very different in tropical and in
temperate trees, but is differently distributed.” But, to be fair to the
tropical woods, so often drowned in the exuberance of their own greenery,
it should be remembered how river banks and other open edges may show
bright with hanging clusters of bloom and radiant festoons climbing to
the tree-tops, while the ground, parched and swamped by turns, will lack
that carpet of sweet and humble flowers, springing among soft turf, that
is the special charm of an English spring.
“What can they know of England who only England know,” seems at present
the favourite tag of imperially minded journalists. It might be more
truly said that only they who know the world know how much England has
to be thankful for in the climate we are so ready to abuse. Their eyes
are opened to see how Nature in our island has all the loveliest tints
on her palette, to paint ever-changing pictures that owe their chief
charm to the supposed defect of uncertainty, even as your Didos and
Cleopatras--_varium et mutabile_--would less surely enchant in the form
of stereotyped models of the most admired virtues.
[Illustration: WILD FLOWERS IN THE BEECH WOODS]
Then a drawback to tropical scenes on which travellers are emphatically
in one tale, is the innumerable plagues bred in such hot air as we
imitate at Kew--here filtered from its hostile engenderings--the
maddening mosquitoes that swarm in equatorial forests as on Arctic
tundras; the legions of ants, white, red, and black, that prey upon
the traveller’s kit and torture his skin like a shirt of Nessus; harpy
moths that have to be driven from one’s food; swarms of earwigs which
some African adventurers have found the hatefulest enemy of their march.
Kew breeds no serpent or vampire like those haunting natural paradises
where the blaze that scares away lions or leopards only attracts darting
spiders and scurrying scorpions to a couch already made restless by
buzzing and biting pests; where the ground hides flesh-burrowing ticks
and fleas, and the air is thick with invisible stings, and the trees
bear venomous caterpillars; where one durst not smell a flower for fear
of inhaling some noxious parasite, and our loathsomest bugs would seem
hardly worth noticing among bloated cockroaches and hideous centipedes;
where countless flies lay seeds of death in man and beast, not to speak
of clouds of locusts that sometimes darken the sky like a snow-storm, and
if they could cross the Channel, might fall on this Thames-side garden to
eat up its greenery in an hour.
And the noises of those sweltering thickets, which at night a new-comer
in South America compares to some factory worked by whirling, whistling
and hissing demons! Even the gloomy stillness of noon, broken by the
fall of some big fruit thudding to the ground like a cannon-ball, or
by some seed-capsule exploding with a report like a shot, even this
heavy siesta of Nature is not altogether voiceless, for beneath it, as
Humboldt says, one can catch a faint stifled undertone, a buzz and
hum of insects that crowd the earth and the lowest strata of air, a
confused vibrating murmur, which from every bush, from the cracked bark
of trees, from the soil burrowed by creeping things, proclaims life
audibly manifest to him who listens. But it is the evening, our emblem of
peace, the welcome twilight through which the ploughboy goes whistling
home, that wakes tropical shades to an untuned concert of croaking,
screaming, chattering, wailing, howling, and humming, when the darkness
seems alive with invisible cracklings, patterings, scratchings, skippings
and rustlings, silenced for the moment by the blood-curdling growl and
crashing spring of some beast of prey, and the piercing death-screech of
its victim echoing far where every foot of ground is scene for nightly
tragedies. One need be no Macbeth to have one’s sleep murdered by alarms
and excursions for which heated imagination acts as a megaphone. “The
clamour of the jackals over a carcass suggests a band of hungry wolves.
A mongoose having it out with a rat beneath the floor is like an animal
Armageddon. Does your faithful dog growl in the verandah, you make sure
a leopard is about to pounce upon him. A restless horse seems to be
trampling like a _must_ elephant. And perhaps over all comes the roar of
the tiger, nothing indeed to be afraid of, as he would go silent enough
if attending to his bad business. Such are the torments of a sweltering
Indian night, that give an Englishman cause to thank the goodness and the
grace that made his birthplace in a land where a caterwauling puss or a
scratching mouse would be the worst of nocturnal bugbears.”
We Britons, lulled to sleep by the tramp of the policeman and the
watch-dog’s honest bark, have some reason for calling “sour grapes” to
the products of those giant greenhouse regions, East and South, where
Nature appears to exhaust herself in labyrinths of swelling beauty and
grandeur. But if the tropical trees had tongues, they might tell us that
we do not judge them fairly in this cramped setting, fettered beneath
roofs of glass, condemned to unnatural silence and restraint; imprisoned
along with strange companions; stinted from full meals of equatorial
storm to the trickling of a rubber hose that can no longer clasp their
trunks in creeping embraces; robbed of the sunshine that floods their
native air with fiery gold, and given in exchange the dull comfort of
hot-water pipes; deserted by the radiant birds, the shining insects, and
the glittering reptiles that should people their drooping branches, among
which the stir of missing monkey-troops seems feebly aped by the murmurs
and movements of workmen hidden in the galleries.
For another kind of more or less unfamiliar vegetation we must seek
the Temperate House, further up the central walks towards the Pagoda.
In this, boasting itself the largest winter garden in the world, are
collected specimens of sun-loving plants, from the acacias of Australia
to the cacti of Mexico. The most venerable growth here seems a shoot of
that now crumbled dragon-tree at Orotava, which Humboldt renowned as
the oldest tree in the world. The most imposing are the araucarias in
the central aisles, one of them the famous Norfolk Island pine, that
in its own home will reach a height of two hundred feet. Some of these
Antipodean strangers can be won to grow in British soil; some would
flourish under its sky, but for their rooted habit of being most active
in our nipping winter. For to their native soil, the seasons, of course,
come reversed from ours, where colonial children must be puzzled by our
poets’ view of January and of July, as we are by allusions seasonable at
the other end of the world:--
Perspiring round our Christmas fare,
In vain we long for snow:
Midsummer day, we fain would sit
Around the Yule-tide’s glow.
The characteristic growth of Australia is the eucalyptus or gum-tree,
in its many varieties, among which the blue gum is best known as
widely transplanted to thrive in Europe and other parts of the globe.
One species seems entitled to the distinction of being the tallest of
trees, growing to a height of four hundred and fifty feet and more, so
as perhaps to look down even upon the mammoth sequoia of California,
which we have so impertinently renamed the Wellingtonia. The question
of aerial precedence between these two, indeed, depending upon doubtful
measurements, may be taken as not quite settled, and Uncle Sam is loth
to admit anything of his as less than the greatest in the world; but he
should know how Sir J. D. Hooker is quoted by Grant Duff as setting down
his boastful mammoths for ugly trees, which is what no one can say of
John Bull’s oaks.
The isolated specimens of Australian vegetation cabined and cribbed at
Kew, give no fair sample of the eucalyptus forests in which leagues upon
leagues of bare straight stems, standing sullenly apart, will rise from
a hundred to two hundred feet before throwing out their scraggy crown
of dull and drooping foliage, that casts a thin unchanging shade upon
the ground littered with peeling bark rather than with fallen leaves. In
this monotonous scenery one might be grateful for our vernal woods and
autumnal hedgerows; and still more so when lost in one of the “scrubs,”
packed close with malicious dwarf trees, thorny bushes, spear-like
grasses, and tangled heaths, that are the dry jungles of Australia’s
inland plains.