Part 10

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.

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.

Australia, besides her tree-like flowers, has trees rich in bright blooms: the “fire-tree” and the “flame-tree” that make a blaze of red and orange upon hill-sides miles away, the crooked “honeysuckle” with its yellow “bottle brushes,” the odd “grass-tree” bearing up a tuft of sharp leaves from which springs several feet of flowery stalk, the “miall-tree” with its streaming foliage and scent of violets, and the other innumerable acacias, here known as “wattles,” that can light up even the gloom of the scrub with their gay blossoms. These growths are apt to run to flowers rather than to fruit, the native berries being sweeter to the eye than to the tooth; and, while the flowers lack perfume, it is the leaves that are often fragrant, sometimes loading the air with an aroma wafted leagues out to sea. Then there are fine timber-trees, magnificent cedars, the umbrageous blackwood, the funereal casuarina or she-oak, whose dark branches droop willow-like over the fitful streams; the jarrah and the karri belonging to the eucalyptus order, the latter voted its most noble form. New Zealand, too, has magnificent and beautiful trees--its kauri, king of conifers, its forests of tree-fern, its jungles of flowering shrubs, its glowing rata parasite, strangling the trunk that nursed it by sucking the sap into its own masses of crimson bloom, like a cuckoo of the vegetable world. But our first Antipodean colonists would exchange a wilderness of such glories for a patch of English turf; and their sons still love to surround themselves with the humble garden flowers and hardy blossoms of “home,” yielding to no land in fresh and tender tints, however it may be surpassed in gorgeous and gigantic growths. Many of our familiar plants, indeed, have been introduced at the Antipodes with sometimes too much success. The branches of apple and pear trees will there break down under their teeming crop; the thistles rashly imported into Australia by some patriotic Scot have thriven to the rank of a nuisance, like the rabbits; the sturdy British gorse and sweet-brier outshoot their native modesty and the design of colonists who thought to make them serve as hedges; and our weeds and hedge plants take so kindly to New Zealand soil as to have overlaid the native flora in some districts, where the coarse indigenous grass soon gives place to succulent meadows spangled with daisies and primroses. Water-cress, transplanted to New Zealand, has grown as troublesome as the American weed in our canals, to the point of causing floods by damming up the streams upon which it takes a new exuberant life.

As measles or influenza fastens upon fresh blood like a plague, so do many of our downtrodden plants become bumptious and aggressive in the stimulating air of a new world, wherever they find a not forbidding environment, and a fair chance to elbow a place for themselves in the struggle for existence. In a less degree, the same conquest is to be noted in America, the old-settled Eastern States having been largely colonised by imported growths, while the indigenous flora retreated with the Red Man to the inland woods and prairies. From the more southerly regions of America, we Europeans have got more than we give, in Indian corn, the tomato, the pineapple, and the hardy potato, that for our damp Western islands has come to be the staff of life as it was on the dry sunny heights of its native Bolivia, though in Britain, as in some parts of the Continent, it had at first to live down most pig-headed prejudices. Besides naturalising the productions of other climates, Kew has the less noted function of exporting our seeds to try their luck abroad, as, for instance, barrels of acorns hence sent to take prosperous root in South Africa.

For the timbers, huge, rich, rare, beautiful and useful, of these exotic trees, and for their products, we turn to the Museums and Economic Houses that are the most instructive part of this exhibition. Here Masters Sandford and Merton might spend many days in enlarging their mental prospects. The cane, for instance, chiefly familiar to them on the seat of chairs, or perhaps by a use that renders sitting a property of uneasiness, they will learn from Mr. Barlow to belong to a great race of arborescent grasses, among which the young gentlemen may perhaps be most interested in the raw and manufactured products of the sugar-cane. Here their well-instructed tutor can point out to them how the bamboo, prince of this race, is beneficent to many peoples, supplying them with paper, ropes, hats, weapons, fans, baskets, umbrellas, tents, mats, boxes, also houses, bridges, masts, sails, ladders, fences, flutes, and other tools, weapons and utensils, amply illustrated in the cases of Museums II. and III.

Off the Rhododendron Walk there is a garden of feathery bamboos that can make shift to stand our open air. In the same quarter, a division labelled _Betula_ is also calculated to throw a shade over the spirit of Master Merton, if not of the blameless Harry Sandford, this in the vernacular being a tree of knowledge too well known to British youngsters of past generations for its base use, frowned on by latter day humanitarians, but a smiling jest to the poets from Shakespeare to Swinburne--

With all its blithe, lithe bounty of buds and sprays, For hapless boys to wince at and grow red, And feel a tingling memory prick their skins.

Now that “the rod becomes more mocked than used,” birch sprays are most familiar to us in the humble usefulness of a broom. Yet on the other side of the world there were nations that would have been hard put to it to do without this tree, used for many offices, but not for that above-mentioned, since your cruel Mohawk and thick-skinned Huron had a strangely sentimental abhorrence of chastising their impish youngsters, which, notes a Jesuit missionary, “will hinder our design to instruct their youth.” But manifold were other services of birch in the wigwam life of the backwoods--for walls, roof, furniture, clothes, torches, powders, poultices, and what not; bark was the Red Man’s cradle and his coffin, and the material for his masterpiece of skill, the canoe; it even at a pinch filled empty stomachs, that could hold out for days on the inner scrapings of bark, when moss, roots, and berries failed his improvident hardihood.

In other parts of the world, the coco-nut tree is of still more general utility, since it not only “bears at once the cup and milk and fruit,” but supplies salad from the young shoots and toddy from the quickly fermented juice; bowls and lamps from its shells, and from its pulp, oil to fill them; cordage, mats, ornamental wreaths and plaited armour from its fibre; fans, baskets, thatch from its leaves; torches from the ribs, and countless other articles of daily use. The Malays, who train monkeys to run up the trees and bring down nuts for their master, have contrived an ingenious clock which Dr. Wallace saw used by sailors: in a bucket floats a scraped half-shell with a small hole bored in the bottom to let in a thread of water at a rate so exactly calculated that the shell sinks at the end of an hour. There are South Sea islands where brackish water makes the people wholly dependent on this tree for drink. Then modern trade has given coconuts a new value, dried in the form of copra and shipped to Marseilles and elsewhere, to have the oil pressed out for making soap and candles, not to mention the “best olive oil” of commerce, while the refuse goes as fattening food for cattle. That is the main thing we get from Polynesia and Micronesia in exchange for trousers, sewing-machines, concertinas, and spelling-books. In Museums I. and II. our young friends may see what delicate and finely tinted cloth those islanders could beat out of bark before they learned to depend too much on our manufactures, being often more healthy and moral without the encumbering garments which the early missionaries considered essential to godliness.

For some islands of the South Seas, the pandanus, rather, fills the part of universal provider. The same thing might be said of other trees in their different regions; but perhaps enough has been said on this head, when one mentions the Brazilian wax-palm (_Copernicia cerifera_), which, though it makes no great show here, according to Mr. J. W. Wells, seems to be as much of a tree-of-all-work as any other in the world.

It resists intense and protracted droughts, and is always green and vigorous; it produces an equivalent to sarsaparilla; a nutritious vegetable like cabbage; wine; vinegar; a saccharine substance; a starch, resembling and equivalent to sago; other substances resemble, or by processes are made to substitute maizena, coffee, cork, wax, salt, alkali, and coco-nut milk; and from its various materials are manufactured wax-candles, soap, mats, hats, musical instruments, water-tubes, pumps, ropes, and cords, stakes for fences, timber for joists, rafters, and other materials for building purposes, strong and light fibres which acquire a beautiful lustre; and in times of great drought it has supplied food for the starving inhabitants.

Specimens of those products will be found chiefly in Museum No. II., illustrating the economic uses of endogenous or monocotyledonous plants, hard words which Mr. Barlow might fancifully explain as denoting the gentler sex of vegetable Nature, its members, from palms to grasses, being inclined to softness, slenderness and grace rather than strength. But perhaps Sandford and Merton might, for once, do well not to listen to their much-informed preceptor, as he would probably be imbued with the Linnean system of classification, now set aside for a more natural one. The robust timber, better supplied by sturdily growing exogens, is exhibited in Museum III., the original “Orangery” built by Sir W. Chambers, that now makes a world-fetched show of huge sections of forest giants; polished slabs of ornamental wood; specimens of native ingenuity in workmanship, from bamboo toys to an appalling totem post carved upon a Queen Charlotte Islands cedar. Another feature here is views and plans of the Gardens at different periods, the localities often hardly to be identified after successive alterations that have brought them to their present state.

The largest, and, on the whole, the most attractive of the Museums is No. I., whose red face looks across the Pond to the Palm House. Its staircase is adorned with a window that reminds one of the _rebus_ designs with which mediæval builders recorded their names in a material pun, for this, removed from the Guildhall and presented to the Gardens by Alderman Cotton, displays on stained glass the stages in the growth and manufacture of cotton. The catalogue contains over five hundred entries and thousands of specimens, most of them capable of instructing even Macaulay’s schoolboy. A large part of the collection was transferred here from the India Museum at South Kensington; but all quarters of the world are represented. Here we may see in various states, tea, coffee, cocoa, wine, tobacco, hops, nutmegs, cloves and other more or less familiar friends, with some not so well known in Britain, such as _maté_, the Paraguayan tea, which begins to be introduced among us, while it goes out of fashion in Argentine cities, still drunk all day long on the _campos_, where also the half-savage Gaucho takes too kindly to “square face” gin and to the gramophone that drowns the notes of his native guitar. Here we may indulge due disgust over outlandish intoxicants: the hemp-plants yielding “bang” and “hashish,” which are in the East what gin and absinthe are in the West; the poppy, that is a drug to us but elsewhere a ruinous dissipation; the coca leaves, the chewing of which gives a Bolivian Indian strength to go on for leagues without food, “but thereof comes in the end despondency and madness”; the kava root of the South Seas, which, first well chewed by strong-jawed young men or girls, then steeped in water, gives an infusion like soapsuds flavoured with Gregory’s powder, a luxury not much appreciated by white men, especially after seeing its preparation, and usually denied to women and youngsters, but ceremoniously presented in coco-nut shells to the grave and reverend seniors, whom a skinful of it affects with a peculiar drunkenness, in the legs rather than the head.

Many medicinal plants here will give us new ideas or old qualms: the liquorice root, yielding what is still in our country districts known as “Spanish juice”; the senna shrubs, that flourish hardily in deserts to furnish black draughts once too much imported into British nurseries; the castor-oil plant, that bears such big clumps of flowers blooming under a tropical sun “too fairly for so foul effect”; the precious quinine, which by bold adventurers was stolen from Peruvian monopoly to thrive on Indian hills and elsewhere. Passing by such exhibits with a shudder, Masters Sandford and Merton will be glad to learn how many doctors nowadays do not much dissent from O. W. Holmes’s dictum that if all drugs, except quinine and a few other specifics, were at the bottom of the sea, it would be so much the better for human health.