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.