The Flowers and Gardens of Madeira

by Florence Du Cane

On the terrace near the house are beds of begonias, roses, geraniums, heliotropes, sweet olives, and the garden flowers common to most Madeira gardens, while the walls are clad with a succession of creepers; so all through the winter months the garden remains a feast of colour.

Eighteen years ago the ground which is now the beautiful garden of the Palace Hotel was nothing but rocky, waste ground, bare of vegetation, except for the clumps of prickly-pear, agaves, and cacti which take possession of all the rocky ground along the shore. For situation the garden is unrivalled, and though the garden lacks the care and attention which naturally are bestowed on a private garden, the luxuriant growth, especially of the creepers, has converted the formerly waste ground into a beautiful jungle of flowers. The garden is devoid of any fine trees, except for the ficus trees, a few oaks, and a stray cypress or two which surround the Dépendence, which was formerly a private house; it stands at the very edge of the precipitous cliff, where the unceasing roar of the surf rings in one’s ears as it dashes almost against its very walls. In front of the main building are some large cabbage palms, affording welcome shade and shelter, which have made astonishingly rapid growth, as only ten years ago they were merely items in flower-beds, and I little thought that on my second visit to the island, some seven years later, they would have become an important feature in the garden.

ALOES AND DAISY TREE

Early in December, when the whole island is fresh and green after the autumn rains, and presents more the aspect of spring than late autumn or even winter, the view from the garden is surprisingly beautiful. The cliffs have broad stretches of the brilliant red-flowered Aloe arborescens, with its large rosettes of glaucous grey-green leaves, which makes the plant always ornamental, even when it is not adorned with its hundreds of scarlet flower spikes. Some people say it was always indigenous to the island, and found its home in the Santa Luzia ravine. Whether this is really the case I feel doubtful, as Mr. Lowe, in his “Flora of Madeira,” quotes it as one of the plants which has become naturalized, though probably originally introduced. Growing on the cliffs the flowers show to great advantage, standing out in sharp contrast to the deep blue sea below, but it is a great ornament wherever it grows, whether in clusters overhanging a wall where its rosettes of leaves overlap each other in thick tufts in endless succession till there seems no reason why they should ever stop, or clothing the rocky ground on the hillside among the pine-trees.

At the same season the Franzeria artemesioides, or daisy-trees, as they are commonly called, are in full beauty. The best method of treating these trees is to cut them back when they have done flowering, as the large clusters of daisy-like flowers appear on the long shoots of young wood. When their flowering season is over, they lose their large grey-green leaves, so it is lucky that the tree can be so treated, or the long bare branches would make them unsightly at other seasons. The hedges and bushes of Plumbago capensis attain to mammoth proportions when they can escape the attention of the gardener’s ruthless shears, and are laden with their lovely soft blue blossoms in late November and December. Then comes a season of rest, though the plant is seldom entirely devoid of colour, and in early spring fresh shoots give promise of a wealth of blossom again in April and May.

Bougainvilleas have been planted with a lavish hand, but unluckily with no regard for colour. I sometimes wondered if the Portuguese gardeners are all colour-blind, as it is by no means uncommon to see a bright purple bougainvillea planted side by side with a scarlet one, and as likely as not, interlaced with a flaming orange bignonia, while the bright pink Charles Turner geranium grows happily below. In Madeira gardens colour runs riot, and I own that the prolonged flowering season of many of the creepers and shrubs makes the colour scheme more difficult than it is in our English gardens.

The great clumps of Crinum powellei are a remarkable feature of this garden, when late in April the great bulbs send up their spikes of either pure white flowers or white delicately flushed with pink. The flowers come in six to ten in an umbel, on stems three to five feet in height, and are very freely produced—large clumps sending up a dozen or more flower-heads at the same time. The bulb has long narrow green foliage, which is very ornamental. The flowers have a delicate but somewhat sickly scent; the plant is a native of Natal, and, like others of its compatriots, has taken kindly to the climate and soil of Madeira.

It would be impossible to enumerate all the host of other plants the garden contains—creepers, shrubs, flowering trees, besides roses, begonias, geraniums, heliotropes, in an almost endless list—while the cliffs have remained a natural rock-garden. In the clefts of the rocks giant agaves occasionally throw up their great flower-heads fifteen feet or more in height, and then the plant, as if exhausted by the supreme effort in the climax of its existence, dies; but it is quickly replaced by hundreds of others, as the seed of the monster flower has found fresh ground in every nook and cranny. Besides the agaves, clumps of prickly-pear, or Opuntia tuna, with its curious succulent growth clothed with poisonous thorns, some wild saxifrages and tufts of Echium fastuosum, known as Pride of Madeira, have all found a home.

This garden is the last one of any interest on the west side of the town, as beyond lie only a few modern villas in the worst possible taste, with no grounds worthy of the name of a garden; but almost opposite to the hotel in the grounds of Casa Branca for a few short weeks in the year the avenue of Poinsettia pulcherrima interspersed with date palms and clumps of strelitzias is worth seeing. The poinsettia blooms are almost the largest I have ever seen, measuring quite eighteen inches in diameter from point to point of the scarlet leaves. Like the daisy tree, the poinsettia flowers on the young wood, and throws out fresh branches six to ten feet long, which can be cut back in January, when the beauty of the blossoms is gone and the foliage becomes an unsightly yellow and at length drops altogether. When seen growing in all their luxuriant and garish splendour, it is difficult to remember that it is the same plant that one has seen in a weakly and attenuated form in our English stove-houses, with one poor little flower-head at the end of a single stem imperfectly clad with sickly foliage. Poinsettias seem to rejoice in rich soil, and they appear to revel in the liberal feeding of the adjoining banana plantations, which, no doubt, they deprive of a good deal of nourishment; but they well repay their owner, as in the glow of the western sun they provide a veritable feast of colour all through December.