The Flowers and Gardens of Madeira

by Florence Du Cane

Some of the cabbage and date palms have attained an immense size, and are a great ornament to the landscape, and some fine groups of the curious screw pine, Pandanus odoratissima; it has peculiar flat leaves and an uncouth flower, which bears a strong resemblance to the body of a dead rabbit hanging from the plant! The grounds command fine views, and were laid out for the present owner by an English landscape gardener. There is a curious cave or grotto formed out of the natural rock, clothed with ferns and mosses, which no doubt remains cool and damp through the summer, and forms a welcome retreat from the fierce heat of the sun.

Close by are the grounds of Quinta Stanford, or Quinta Pitta, as it was originally called by its first owner. The gardens have been very much enlarged by their present owner; banana plantations have gradually vanished, and the grounds no longer present the cramped appearance from which they formerly suffered. New-comers to Madeira, as a rule, express great surprise that the gardens are not larger and generally only cover such a very small piece of ground. The value of the land for agricultural purposes—formerly for growing vines, then, possibly, for banana cultivation, and now for sugar-cane—is no doubt largely responsible for this, and also the great difficulty of acquiring a piece of ground of any considerable size in the neighbourhood of Funchal. In many cases even one acre may be owned by several different landlords, land being divided into incredibly small holdings.

CYPRESS AVENUE, QUINTA STANFORD

In this respect the owners of Quinta Stanford are to be envied, as the house stands well surrounded by its own ground, out of sight of the too common unsightly fazenda and its inevitable squalid cottages. From the terrace in front of the house the view is unrivalled, comprising a fine view of the sea and an unbroken view of the mountains behind the town of Funchal. It is easily seen that the garden is tended with unceasing care by its present owner, and near the entrance some judicious massing of shrubs and flowering trees has in a very few years well repaid the planter; some large clumps of weigandias, Astrapea pendiflora, and bushes of common white marguerite daisies of mammoth proportions give a broader effect than is usual in most Madeira gardens. To my mind, the very greatest praise should also be given to the owner for having planted an avenue of cypresses, almost the noblest and grandest of all trees, especially when seen under a southern sun, and their absence in the landscape of Madeira is keenly felt. The Portuguese see no beauty in them, and only connect them with death, for which reason they are scarcely ever seen except in cemeteries. From the astonishing growth which the young trees at Quinta Stanford have made in a few years, it is evident that the soil is very favourable for their culture, and it seems almost incredible that more owners of gardens, who must have seen what Italy owes to her cypresses, should not have planted them in Madeira; but it is to be hoped that even now others may follow the excellent example set before them at Quinta Stanford.

The owner of the garden has much to tell of the successes and failures he has made, not only with imported plants, in the hopes of inducing them to find a new home in Madeira, but he journeyed far and wide to make a collection of the native ferns, of which there are a great quantity. Many of them, removed from the cool, damp air of their mountain homes, pined and died a lingering death in the air of Funchal, which was too hot and dry; and the atmosphere of a stufa, or greenhouse, is unsuited to the hardier ferns.

Some interesting experiments have also been made with rock-plants, in order to see whether it would be possible to induce any of our favourite Alpine plants to adopt a home in warmer climes; but I fear, though some may survive for a year or two, in the end they will grow steadily smaller, until they dwindle away and cease to exist. So I am afraid the making of a rock-garden in the sense which we in England regard a rock-garden—i.e., an artificial arrangement of rocks, clothed with carpets and cushions of flowering Alpine plants—will never be possible in Madeira. Here the rock-garden must remain as Nature intended it to be—rocks and cliffs, interspersed with prickly-pear, agaves, cactus, some of the larger saxifrages, and such native plants as Echium fastuosum.

The gardens owned by the English suffer, as a rule, somewhat severely from the absence of their owners just at the season of the year when they require the closest care and attention, and this may possibly account for the failure to acclimatize many of these imported treasures. If they could be tended with loving hands, screened from the fiercest of the sun’s rays, given exactly the amount of water they require, no doubt there would be many less failures; but the ignorant Portuguese gardener probably either starves the plant by entirely omitting to water it, especially if it is unlucky enough to be out of reach of the hose, or else he drowns it with too much water, until the ground surrounding it becomes a swamp: for the conditions suitable to a rock-plant would be as unknown to him as the conditions required by a bog-plant.

Some tree-ferns in a sheltered corner make a very good effect, and seem likely, from the strong growth they have made in a few years, to become very fine specimens.