I asked my way of an old woman who sat by the roadside, complacently smoking a cigarette, and soon found myself within the gates of the Botanical Garden, and in the celebrated waringin avenue, one of the glories of the place. The first impression, I confess, is somewhat disappointing. The avenue is not very long, so that it lacks the depths of green darkness, the prospect along apparently converging parallels of pillar-like trunks, and the bluish shimmer of light afar off, which are the characteristic charms of woodland glades. It seems more like a square, planted with trees on two sides of the quadrangle only, a comparatively narrow space of shadow, abutting on the broad fields of sunlight beyond. After a while, however, one notices the smallness of the figures moving past the trees, men, horses, and bullock-carts. By comparison, one begins to realize the gigantic proportions of it all,—the length and breadth and height of the leafy vault overhead, and the hugeness of those stupendous growths that support it, each of them a grove in itself, congregated hundreds of trees, group by group of stately stems crowding round the colossal parent bole. Then, bye and bye, the sense of grandeur is succeeded by a curious impression of lifelessness. In their vast size, their stark immobility, and their rigid attitudes, these grey masses resemble granite peaks and cliffs rather than trees. The aged trunks, broadbased, are riven and fissured like weather-beaten rocks, showing gnarled protuberances and black clefts from which ferns and mosses droop. Some, rotten to the core—nothing left of the trunk but a fragment of grey gnarled rind, with the fungus-overgrown mould lying heaped up against the base—resemble boulders, covered with earth and detritus. One or two, quite decayed, hang in mid-air, dependent from a dome of interlacing branches, stems, and air-roots, like some gigantic stalactite from the roof of a pillared cavern. And, aloft, the dense masses of foliage, grey against the sunlit brilliancy of the sky, seem like the broken and crumbling vault of this immense grotto. This strange resemblance of living vegetable matter to inert stone ceases only when, issuing from among the stems, one looks at the waringins from a distance, and sees the grey multitude of boles, trunks, and stems disappearing under spreading masses of foliage, resplendent in the sun.
A Hill-man.
In the depth of the ravine.
The garden is worthy of this magnificent entrance. Enthusiastic "savants" have sung its praises in all the languages of civilization, and, by common consent, have declared it to be the finest botanical garden in the world, assigning the second place to famous Kew, and mentioning the gardens of Berlin, Paris, and Vienna as third, fourth, and fifth in order of merit. Originally, it was no more than the park belonging to the country-house, which Governor-General Van Imhoff built here in 1754: a house since destroyed by an earth-quake, and on the site of which the present lodge was erected.
Watch-men.
In this park, Professor Bernwardt, some eighty years ago, arranged a small botanical garden, a "hortus" as the innocent pedantry of the period called it. The idea was to gather in this fertile spot specimens of all the plants and trees growing in Java, so as to afford men of science an opportunity for studying the flora of the island. By and bye, however, especially under the direction of Teysmann, many plants from other countries were introduced, with a view of acclimatizing them in Java, often with signal success. And, recently, a museum and a library have been established, as well as several laboratories for chemical, botanical, and pharmaceutical research. For the cultivation of such plants as require a cool climate, gardens have been laid out on the terraced hill-side, in ascending tiers that climb up to the heights of Tji-Bodas, where in the early morning, the temperature is 10° Celsius. These ameliorations, for the greater part, are due to the untiring energy of the eminent scientist now directing the garden.