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.
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.