We hear nothing of irrigation, but almost everything will thrive without it. The soil grows well all varieties of fruits found in the Eastern and New England States, besides all the semi-tropical fruits, as guavas, loquats, persimmons, dates, etc. As the Rev. Mr. Jackson says: "Could it be shown that the primitive Eden bore as many fruits pleasant to the taste, it would add a new pang to the thought of original sin."
The number of native trees seems small, but trees have been naturalized here from every part of the world. The pepper tree is from Peru, also the quinine tree: from Chili, the monkey tree and the Norfolk Island pine.
Mr. Cooper imported the eucalyptus from Australia. It grows rapidly, and is planted for windbreaks. It is used for firewood, and when cut down nearly to the ground will start up with the same old courage and ambition. Its roots are so eager for water that they make long detours, sometimes even climbing up and down a stone wall, if it is in their route, or into a well. From the same country comes the acacia, the rubber tree, and a large number of shrubs. New Zealand contributes her share, and to China and Japan they are indebted for the camphor tree, the gingko, the loquat, and the chestnuts. To South Africa they are indebted for the silver tree, and from the northern part of that country the date-palm and the tamarind.
One sees side by side here, and in Pasadena, trees from almost opposite climes: the New England elm and a cork tree, a cedar of Lebanon and a maple or an English oak. Then the glorious palm—twenty-two varieties in Montecito Valley alone.
Sydney Smith said of the fertility of Australia, "Tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest." But in California even the hoe is not needed, for "volunteer crops" come up all by themselves, and look better than ours so carefully cultivated. They say that if a Chinaman eats a watermelon under a tree the result is a fine crop of melons next year. And I read of a volunteer tomato plant ploughed down twice that measured twelve feet square, and bore thousands of small red tomatoes.
Alfalfa is an ever-growing crop—can be garnered five times each year.
And as for flowers, I really cannot attempt to enumerate or describe in detail. There are hundreds of varieties of roses. They were found growing wild by myriads, and have been most carefully cultivated and improved. One rose tree in the grounds of the Arlington Hotel has spread over sixty feet of the veranda, and three lady guests have climbed into its branches at once. As one man said: "The roses here would climb to the moon if a trellis could be provided."
A friend sent me twenty-five large bunches of the choicest roses from her garden one morning in April, each bunch a different variety. Their roses are shipped in large quantities to San Francisco, and Chicago has her churches decorated at Easter from the rose gardens of Santa Barbara.
Honey naturally is thought of. Apiculture here is a great business. The bee has to be busy all day long and all through the year—no rest. One ingenious fellow proposed crossing the working bee with the firefly, so it could work all night long by its own lantern. But this is better. I hear wondrous stories of bees getting into cracks of church towers or upper stories, and bulging out the buildings with their accumulated stores—positively cartloads of sweetness. Think of honey made from orange flowers selling at five cents a pound!
A clergyman writing of Santa Barbara County says that twenty-five years ago all their vegetables were imported. Now beans yield a ton to the acre, potatoes two hundred and fifty bushels per acre, and he has seen potatoes that weighed six, seven, and eight and a half pounds—as much as an ordinary baby; beets, seventy-five tons to the acre; carrots, thirty. Mr. Webster once declared in Congress that this State could never raise a bushel of grain. Corn yields fifty bushels to the acre; barley, sixty; wheat, thirty. Others give much higher records: corn, one hundred and thirty bushels; barley, eighty; potatoes, four hundred; forty tons of squashes, four tons of hay, sixty tons of beets.