CREEPERS
The year opens in Madeira with a wealth of blossom, as in the month of
January the bougainvilleas, for which Madeira is so justly famous, will
be in all their flaunting beauty. It is true that the lilac-coloured
_Bougainvillea glabra_ will have already shed most of its blossoms, as
it is a summer-flowering creeper, but it is replaced by so many other
varieties that its pale beauty is forgotten. The brick-red coloured
_Bougainvillea spectabilis_--which must have the full force of the sun
upon it in order to bring out its colour to the best advantage, being
apt otherwise to look a false colour--when grown over pergolas, or
corridors as they are called in Madeira, or allowed to wander at will
over a wall or bank, provides a gorgeous mass of colour. I had seen
bougainvilleas in other countries, but only grown against walls, and
closely cropped by shears, in order that the wood might be sufficiently
ripened by the heat of the summer to insure its wealth of blossoms.
Here such care is not necessary, and the natural beauty of the plant
can be seen to full advantage where it has escaped the ruthless shears
of the Portuguese gardener. Branches of blossom, ten, fifteen, or
even twenty feet long, show the strength with which the plant grows;
in fact, many a splendid specimen has had to be sacrificed, for fear
it should undermine a terrace wall or shake the very foundations of a
house.
To the landscape gardener who is fastidious as to the scheme of
colouring in his garden, the placing of all the varieties of
bougainvillea (called after the French navigator, De Bougainville)
forms one of his chief difficulties. Each in itself seems too beautiful
to be discarded; but, unless the garden is of considerable extent, I
would recommend the owner of the garden to harden his heart and make
his choice of the colour he prefers and stick to it, only growing the
one variety in some great mass, be it as the gorgeous canopy of his
corridor, or clothing his garden-wall.
Many persons give the palm for beauty to the deep magenta variety,
_speciosa_, as it stands alone for colour. In all the kingdom of
flowers I know no other blossom of the same tone of colour; it is a
thing apart, this royal purple flower. No one who has seen the plant
which covers the cliff below the fort can ever forget its beauty. Seen
from the sea, it stands out like a purple rock in the middle of the
city. By the middle of January it will be in all its gaudy, garish
splendour, the admired of all beholders.
It can well be imagined how these two varieties--the one brick-red, the
other deep magenta--would strike a jarring note in any garden if grown
side by side, or even within sight of each other. And do not imagine
that Madeira only boasts of these two coloured bougainvilleas in its
winter season. From these two have sprung many others--seedlings, no
doubt, hybridized in a country where the heat of the sun will ripen
most seeds. So now there are rosy reds, lighter or darker, to choose
from, shading through a range of colour which, like the beauty of its
parents, seems to stand alone.
The plant has, I consider, two enemies in the island. One is the
ordinary uneducated Portuguese gardener, who seems to think that the
art of gardening consists in so closely pruning a creeper or shrub
that all the natural grace and beauty of the plant is lost for ever,
as often as not choosing the moment for this cruel treatment when the
plant is in full flower. Though Nature has done her best to protect
the plant from the hand of man, by giving it long, hooked thorns, which
are exceedingly sharp, and, I believe, somewhat poisonous, even this
has not been sufficient, and many a beautiful specimen have I seen
maimed and dwarfed beyond repair in a few hours by an ignorant and
overzealous gardener. Its second enemy is rats, which unfortunately
have a great love for the bark on the stems of old plants, and many a
plant narrowly escapes destruction at their hands, or rather teeth.
The second place in the list of creepers for the New Year must be given
to the flaming orange _Bignonia venusta_, a native of South America,
with its dense clusters of finger-shaped flowers. This has now become
the commonest of all creepers in Madeira, and there is hardly a road
in the neighbourhood of Funchal where all through the month of January
there is not a stretch of wall bearing its gaudy burden, or a _mirante_
(as the arbour or summer-house dear to the hearts of the Portuguese is
called) without its roof of golden blossoms. There is a long list of
bignonias and tecomas--a family so closely allied to each other as to
be almost united--whose full beauty is for a later season; and only
stray blossoms of the deep red _Bignonia cherare_, with its long
yellow-throated trumpets, appear in the winter months, but sufficient
to give promise of glories to come in the month of April.
[Illustration: BIGNONIA VENUSTA]
In the same month the close-growing _Tecoma flava_ will become wreathed
with its golden-yellow trumpet flowers, clothing many a wall and
straying across tiled roofs, as it is so neat and clinging in its
habit that it never becomes so heavy a mass as to damage buildings.
Its companion at the same season is _Tecoma Lindleyana_, bearing large
mauve trumpet flowers, with a throat of a lighter shade. The individual
flowers are of extremely delicate texture, and are beautifully veined
with a slightly darker shade of purple. Yet another tecoma unfurls
its blossoms late in the month of April, but is not so often met with
as the two former varieties, possibly because the plant, when out of
flower, presents rather an unsightly and straggling appearance; but no
one can fail to admire the pure white and yellow-throated blossoms of
this _Tecoma Micheliensis_, as it is most commonly called, though I
believe it has a second, and possibly more correct, name.
For May and June is reserved, probably, the most beautiful of all the
tecomas, _jasminoides_. The plant is an ornament at all seasons; its
beautiful glabrous foliage seems to retain its freshness at all seasons
of the year, and when the plant is covered with its bunches of large
white blossoms, each with its deep red-purple throat, which seems to
reflect a shade of purple on to the white petals, it is one of the most
beautiful of all creepers.
From the list of winter creepers the _Thunbergia laurifolia_, with
its bunches of grey-blue gloxinia-shaped blossoms, cannot be omitted;
though the beauty of the plant is somewhat spoilt by the habit of the
dead blossoms hanging on instead of falling, and marring, by their
brown, shrivelled appearance, all the freshness of the newly developed
flowers. The plant always recalls to my mind the reason given by the
Japanese for not admiring the national flower of England--the rose--as
they complain that it clings with ungraceful tenacity to life, as
though loath or afraid to die, preferring to rot on its stem rather
than drop untimely; unlike the blossoms of spring, ever ready to depart
life at the call of Nature. Such is certainly the case with thunbergia.
The creeper is also a dangerous poacher, and, unless kept within
bounds, will soon smother and overwhelm any shrub or tree that it may
take possession of, though never in Madeira attaining to the vast
proportions that it assumes in Ceylon or other tropical countries,
where it takes possession of even the tallest forest-trees, and hangs
its long trailers from one tree to another, and on and on again, in one
dense tangle. The white variety does not seem to have been introduced
to Madeira, and its pure white blossoms recall gardens in St. Vincent
and other West Indian islands.
Yet another creeper whose flowering season belongs to the winter months
is the scarlet passionflower, _Passiflora coccinea_. By the end of
January the plant will be covered with a few fully opened flowers,
many half-developed flowers and innumerable buds giving promise of its
future splendour. On first acquaintance, one is deceived into thinking
that in a few days’ time the plant will be a sheet of scarlet blossoms,
but such is not the case: each individual flower is short-lived, and by
the time the half-developed blossoms have opened, the fully expanded
blooms of yesterday have vanished. Thus its flowering season is a
prolonged one, but it never attains to any very gaudy splendour.
By the last days of March the racemes of that most beautiful of all
creepers, _Wistaria chinensis_, or _sinensis_, will have begun to
lengthen, and gradually clothe the whole plant with a pale purple
canopy. The vine--as it is called the grape-flower vine, from the
resemblance of its blossoms to a bunch of grapes--is a native of China
and Japan, and also of parts of North America, which accounts for the
fact that it received the name of wistaria (by which it is known all
over the Western world) from one Caspar Wistar, a medical professor
in the University of Pennsylvania. In Japan the plant is known as
_fuji_, and is so universally admired that, in common with many other
flowers, it is made the excuse for many a flower-feast, when hundreds,
thousands, and even tens of thousands of pleasure-seekers will hold
their revels, or sit quietly sipping their tea under a roof of the
royal _fuji_. Though in Madeira it is not the fashion of the country to
hold flower-feasts, or to make flowers the theme of poems and plays,
or to regard wistaria as an emblem of gentleness and obedience, as is
the case in its Eastern home, yet in this land of its adoption it comes
in for its full share of admiration. Corridors and walls which have
been passed by unnoticed through the winter months, having been only
clad with the long, bare, leafless branches, the last leaves having
fallen early in December, suddenly become transformed, and for a few
short days--all too short, alas!--become the centre of attraction in
the garden. Like in Japan, the wistaria season begins with the white
wistaria, which has been christened in the Western world _Wistaria
Japonica_, and “it would seem as though this modest white wistaria
had been allowed by Nature to bloom so early, for fear she should be
overlooked and not appreciated when her more showy successor flings her
purple mantle over the land.” There are good specimens of this early
white variety in the gardens of the Quinta da Levada and the Quinta do
Val.
The variety known as _Wistaria multijuga_, for which Japan is so justly
famous, as it appears to be the only country where its full beauty can
be seen, has been introduced with but little success to the island. It
is true that it will grow, and grow strong, but its long racemes of
thin, pale, washed-out-looking flowers are but a sorry sight to those
who have ever seen the far-famed Kameido Temple grounds in Tokyo, when
the vines, with their long purple tassels, often over three feet in
length, clothe the long trellises and almost smother the guests who
sit feasting beneath them, gazing across at the long vista of mauve
blossoms reflected in the water below. But even in Japan this far-famed
_multijuga_ variety is only to be met with in certain districts and as
a cultivated form, and is never seen clambering from tree to tree in a
wild state, like the _chinensis_ variety. The wistaria season closes as
well as opens with a white-flowered form both in Japan and Madeira, as
the variety known as _macrobotrys_, with its very long racemes of white
blossoms, prolongs the beauty of the _fuji_ feast at the celebrated
Kameido Temple; and here in Madeira, though only one or two plants of
it exist, it is the last to retain its beauty.
The summer months will have their own creepers, though not such showy
ones as the winter and spring months; but if they are lacking in
colour, many of them atone for that by their delicious fragrance. To
these belong _Rhyncospermum jasminoides_, or _Trachelospermum_, as
I believe it is more correctly called, whose white starry flowers
fill the whole air with their almost overpowering scent. The plant
is a native of China and Japan, where it may be seen growing in
a perfectly wild state in hedgerows. There is another variety
called _angustifolium_ whose blossoms are much the same, but the
foliage differs, and this kind is said to prove hardy when grown
against a wall in the South of England. The well-known _Stephanotis
floribunda_, called in its native country the Madagascar chaplet
flower, unfurls its heavy-scented waxy blossoms in the summer months.
_Allamanda schotii_, hoyas, with their clusters of waxy red blossoms,
mandevilleas, and hosts of others, are seldom seen in their beauty by
the English owners of gardens.