The “Residence” stands in a fine situation, in large grounds of its own, at the foot of the mountains. It has been lately built, regardless of expense, for the colony is rich, and likes to do things handsomely. On the lawn, under the windows, stood a tree which was entirely new to me, an enormous ceiba or silk-cotton-tree, umbrella-shaped, fifty yards in diameter, the huge and buttressed trunk throwing out branches so massive that one wondered how any woody fibre could bear the strain of their weight, the boughs twisting in and out till they made a roof over one’s head, which was hung with every fantastic variety of parasites.
Vast as the ceibas were which I saw afterwards in other parts of the West Indies, this was the largest. The ceiba is the sacred tree of the negro, the temple of Jumbi, the proper house of Obeah. To cut down one is impious. No black in his right mind would wound even the bark. A Jamaica police officer told me that if a ceiba had to be removed, the men who used the axe were well dosed with rum to give them courage to defy the devil.
From Government House we strolled into the adjoining Botanical Gardens. I had long heard of the wonders of these. The reality went beyond description. Plants with which I was familiar as shrubs in English conservatories were here expanded into forest giants, with hundreds of others of which we cannot raise even Liliputian imitations. Let man be what he will, nature in the tropics is always grand. Palms were growing in the greatest luxuriance, of every known species, from the cabbage towering up into the sky to the fan-palm of the desert whose fronds are reservoirs of water.
Of exogenous trees the majority were leguminous in some shape or other, forming flowers like a pea or vetch and hanging their seeds in pods; yet in shape and foliage they distanced far the most splendid ornaments of an English park. They had Old-World names with characters wholly different: cedars which were not conifers, almonds which were no relations of peaches, and gum-trees as unlike eucalypti as one tree can be unlike another.
Again, you saw ferns which you seemed to recognize till some unexpected anomaly startled you out of your mistake. A gigantic Portugal laurel, or what I took for such, was throwing out a flower direct from the stem like a cactus. Grandest among them all, and happily in full bloom, was the sacred tree of Burmah, the Amherstia nobilis, at a distance like a splendid horse-chestnut, with crimson blossoms in pendent bunches, each separate flower in the convolution of its parts exactly counterfeiting a large orchid, with which it had not the faintest affinity, the Amherstia being leguminous like the rest.
Underneath, and dispersed among the imperial beauties, were spice-trees, orange-trees, coffee plants, and cocoa, or again, shrubs with special virtues or vices. We had to be careful what we were about, for fruits of fairest appearance were tempting us all round. My companion was preparing to eat something to encourage me to do the same. A gardener stopped him in time. It was nux vomica. I was straying along a less frequented path, conscious of a heavy vaporous odor, in which I might have fainted had I remained exposed to it. I was close to a manchineel-tree.
Prettiest and freshest were the nutmegs, which had a glen all to themselves and perfumed the surrounding air. In Trinidad and in Grenada I believe the nutmegs are the largest that are known, being from thirty to forty feet high; leaves brilliant green, something like the leaves of an orange, but extremely delicate and thin, folded one over the other, the lowest branches sweeping to the ground till the whole tree forms a natural bower, which is proof against a tropical shower. The fragrance attracts moths and flies; not mosquitoes, who prefer a ranker atmosphere. I saw a pair of butterflies the match of which I do not remember even in any museum, dark blue shot with green like a peacock’s neck, and the size of English bats. I asked a black boy to catch me one. “That sort no let catchee, massa,” he said; and I was penitently glad to hear it.
Among the wonders of the garden are the vines, as they call them, that is, the creepers of various kinds that climb about the other trees. Standing in an open space there was what once had been a mighty “cedar.” It was now dead, only the trunk and dead branches remaining, and had been murdered by a “fig-vine” which had started from the root, twined itself like a python round the stem, strangled out the natural life, and spreading out in all directions, had covered boughs and twigs with a foliage not its own. So far the “vine” had done no worse than ivy does at home, but there was one feature about it which puzzled me altogether. The lowest of the original branches of the cedar were about twenty feet above our heads. From these in four or five places the parasite had let fall shoots, perhaps an inch in diameter, which descended to within a foot of the ground and then suddenly, without touching that or anything, formed a bight like a rope, went straight up again, caught hold of the branch from which they started, and so hung suspended exactly as an ordinary swing.
In three distinctly perfect instances the “vine” had executed this singular evolution, while at the extremity of one of the longest and tallest branches high up in the air it had made a clean leap of fifteen feet without visible help and had caught hold of another tree adjoining on the same level. These performances were so inexplicable that I conceived that they must have been a freak of the gardener’s. I was mistaken. He said that at particular times in the year the fig-vine threw out fine tendrils which hung downward like strings. The strongest among them would lay hold of two or three others and climb up upon them, the rest would die and drop off, while the successful one, having found support for itself above, would remain swinging in the air and thicken and prosper. The leap he explained by the wind. I retained a suspicion that the wind had been assisted by some aspiring energy in the plant itself, so bold it was and so ambitious.
But the wonders of the garden were thrown into the shade by the cottage at the extreme angle of it, where Kingsley[A] had been the guest of Sir Arthur Gordon. It is a long straggling wooden building with deep verandas lying in a hollow overshadowed by trees, with views opening out into the savanna through arches formed by clumps of tall bamboos, the canes growing thick in circular masses and shooting up a hundred feet into the air, where they meet and form frames for the landscape, peculiar and even picturesque when there are not too many of them. These bamboos were Kingsley’s special delight, as he had never seen the like of them elsewhere. The room in which he wrote is still shown, and the gallery where he walked up and down with his long pipe. His memory is cherished in the island as of some singular and beautiful presence which still hovers about the scenes which so delighted him in the closing evening of his own life.