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.
Young monkeys, still strong in jaw and gastric juice, will pay more attention to the different kinds of nuts, too reckless dealings with which has often caused nauseous draughts to be “exhibited”; and they may be surprised to learn how the triangular Brazil nuts of our shops are not independent growths, but neatly packed in parcels of two dozen or so in a shell like a cannon ball, so hard and heavy as to crack a man’s skull on which it should fall. The youth of this generation will not be so much interested as an old fogey is in carob pods, believed to be the locusts that fed St. John, and that still feed men and cattle in some parts of the world. The other day I had a shock of mild surprise in seeing dried locusts for sale in a back street shop-window, from which I had supposed them long vanished; but in my period of unpampered stomachs and scrimp pocket-money they had a great sale among schoolboys, as giving for a minimum of expenditure a maximum of sweet, stiff chewing, with this additional recommendation, that the seeds, scrunched under one’s mischievous heel, made a squeaking noise subversive of discipline—a trick, let us trust, never tried on Mr. Barlow. He will here find a cue to explain how some fruits that are to us mere luxuries more or less digestible, such as chestnuts and dates, make the staple food of certain regions, not only raw but dried, ground into flour and baked into bread; the stones of dates also being crushed as fodder for North African cattle. Then here we have the cassava, which in its native state is deadly poison, but can be prepared to feed wholesomely many tribes of Africans and South Americans, and to supply us with our toothsome tapioca. Here indeed are poisonous preparations enough to kill all Kew, including the juice of that upas tree of whose deadly shade a cock-and-bull story took such deep root in our language that it still affords a fictitious trope for orators.
Mr. Barlow might find much to say on the many useful or curious plants here represented, notably the various trees and creepers whose juice, once oozing to waste in leafy wildernesses, now becomes more and more important through the increasing demand for india-rubber in our greedy manufactures. But his hearers might begin to yawn before he had got through one-tenth of over a hundred cases here laid out for inspection; so, as soon as the shower be over that has driven us into this instructive refuge, let us go forth into the open air, only pausing to look respectfully on the portraits of botanists and explorers, among which the tutor may point to Sir Joseph Banks, or Baron von Humboldt, while the pupils will want rather to identify Captain Cook; the general public may be most concerned to see Charles Darwin or Marianne North; and those who have had the patience to read through the foregoing chapters can pick out George III., Lord Bute, the Aitons, the Hookers, and other worthies there touched upon in connection with Kew’s history.
It would take one, indeed, from opening to closing time to go through even the salient features of these spacious Gardens. What one turns to by choice will partly depend on taste, and partly on the season. Early in the year, as the official guide reminds us, we can look out for the snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils that “take the winds of March with beauty.” Then open the tulips about the Palm House, the bluebells in the remote corner marked by the Queen’s Cottage, the wild hyacinths beneath the budding beech-trees; and horse-chestnut flowers strew the way to the blooming rhododendron walks; and next comes the turn of the azaleas and roses, till the whole area is overspread by vari-coloured blooms, in autumn dying with a pale sunset of chrysanthemums.