One of the greatest features of interest to the scientific botanist, and even to the less instructed lover of nature, which Italy presents, consists in the circumstance that the northern and southern types of vegetation—to speak more closely, the northern-temperate and the sub-tropical—meet together, especially in its warmer regions, in stronger contrast than probably anywhere else. The same remark is true, no doubt, of the Mediterranean shores in general: but those of France and of Turkey approach more to the general northern aspect; those of Barbary to the tropical: in favoured Italy the two types seem sometimes to blend and sometimes to contrast in ever-changing and ever-striking variety. The same was doubtless, to some extent, the case in ancient times. But the northern character was probably far more prevalent than now. The early Greek settlers landed on a forest region, where the common deciduous trees of the north, now driven back to the scantily clothed gorges of the central Apennines, flourished in great abundance. Such a nature as this may still be observed in the few forest patches left in the higher Abruzzi, the Sila of Calabria, and so forth. “The beech-forest,” says Schouw, “is called the symbol of the Danish character. But I have wandered in Calabria through large and beautiful beech-woods, on the higher plateaux of the Apennines, where the vegetation as well as the bracing air constantly reminded me of my home.” Probably the wild shores of Corsica, or those of Dalmatia, with their shaggy growth of northern forest and their undergrowth of mixed northern and Mediterranean shrubs, present an aspect more resembling what the followers of Ulysses and Æneas beheld when they landed, than may elsewhere be found. We may notice historical traces of the continued existence of this ruder and fresher nature, not only in the agricultural writers of the Romans, who speak far more of deciduous trees than of the evergreen, now deemed so characteristic of Italy, but in the well-known pages of Virgil. There is not in general much of “local colour” in the ‘Eclogues’ and ‘Georgics:’ that is a poetical artifice of later day. But what there is, represents the physiognomy, not of the Lombard plains where he was born, but of the neighbourhood of Naples in which he lived. His sea-sand is “black,” not brown or yellow, like that of all other bards,—the volcanic sand of the bays of Baiæ and Naples—very coal-dust in appearance. When he recommends the farmer to place his hives near a tree, for the bees to swarm on, it is a “palm-tree, or huge oleaster”—advice which he might as well have tendered to a Scythian as to a colonus of his native Mantua. Now, the general idea which the verses of Virgil convey of the region with which he is concerned, is that of a sylvan country—not, emphatically, the “land of the cypress and myrtle,” but of the oak, ash, linden, wych-elm, beech, citizens of the great Transalpine forests. Some of the trees of which he celebrates the grandeur are now not only become scarce in his country, but it is difficult to ascertain with accuracy their real character. The mighty æsculus, for example, the noblest denizen of Latian forests, which formed of itself great woods, “lata æsculeta,” is a mere puzzle for antiquarian botanists: no one knows what it was, and there may be some question whether it has not disappeared from the face of earth, or whether it survives only in some nearly extinct variety of oak.[[5]]
Man has doubtless done much towards the effecting of this change, the more valuable plants of the south having been gradually introduced, and the indigenous woods cleared for their reception; but Nature has done much of herself. In the remaining woodland districts of maritime Italy—such as the Maremme of Tuscany and the Latian Campagna—the evergreen species seem to be gradually supplanting the deciduous, the foreign the indigenous. We talk familiarly of the hardy vegetation of the North; but, where the two meet on conditions of climate endurable by both, the children of the tropical sun seem to show the greater hardihood, and to come out survivors in the great battle for existence. Their every aspect, their rough bark and leathery leaves, seem indicative of a stronger vitality than that which animates the more majestic but more delicate structure of the leafy giants of the northern temperate zone. A similar law—if the analogy does not appear too fanciful—seems to govern the migrations of trees and shrubs, and of the human family itself. The North produces the races of more commanding aspect: it sends them forth conquering and to conquer; they establish empires, they subjugate the so-called feebler races of the South; but, in the midst of their conquests, they sicken and perish, and become extinct. The children of the South gradually penetrate northwards, and by their own more prolific multiplication, as well as by crossing or intermixture, in which their more essentially vigorous nature attains predominance, they efface the type of the Northern race, and cause it ultimately to disappear. What has become of the descendants of those hordes which swarmed from the populous North, in the decline of the Roman Empire, over all the regions adjacent to the Mediterranean? They have vanished, or are scarcely recognised by antiquaries in a few problematical instances, where small insulated communities, thought to be of Teutonic or Gothic origin, maintain a precarious existence among the descendants of their former subjects. Where are the historical Gauls, with their tall figures, their fleshy frames, their golden hair, and eyes of truculent blue? A few of them, possibly, to be found in Flanders; but anything less like the Gaul of antiquity than the sinewy, nervous, agile, undersized, brown-skinned, and black-haired biped, who now inhabits some eighty out of the eighty-five departments of France, can hardly be imagined. What is become even of the purer Northern breed of Germany itself? Scarcely to be found, except on the shores of the Baltic: elsewhere the ordinary European type prevails, olive skin and cheveux châtains. “I sought for the fair population of classical Germany in vain,” says Niebuhr, “until I found it in Scandinavia.” On the other hand, the Greek in Provence, the Moor in Spain, Southrons, transplanted into those countries in no very great numbers, have impressed their type on the general population, and, as it were, changed the very breed. When dark and fair intermix, the odds seem to be greatly in favour of the dark complexion prevailing in the offspring. We heard lately of a society formed in France for the conservation of the “Xanthous,” or yellow-haired variety of the human race, which they regard as the true aristocracy of nature, and rightly conceive to be threatened with extinction: their object to be attained by portioning from time to time blonde maidens who might take to themselves husbands of the same complexion. Even so—to return to our trees—the meridional vegetation gradually drives back that of the North in the battlefield of species. If we figure to ourselves the appearance of the plains of England two thousand years ago, with their indigenous vegetable covering only—without the common elm, the linden, plane, sycamore, poplar, acacia, chestnut, fruit-trees of every kind, and cultivated plants in general—without, probably, a single species of pine or fir, or indeed any evergreen but box, yew, and holly—and remember that every foreign plant has displaced a native, we may gather some idea of the conquests which the South has effected even here, not indeed without the aid of human industry, but in part by sheer physical superiority. But on the Mediterranean coast these conquests have been much more marked. Take the following description of the change which two thousand years have made in the common flora of Greece, from the work of a German botanist (Fraas, Klima und Pflanzenwelt):—
“The following species from the flora known to Theophrastus have either entirely disappeared from Greece, or have emigrated from the habitations which he assigns to them, and withdrawn into the moister climate of more northerly regions; the varieties commonly known to the ancients of the Linden; the Yew, that child of damp and shady hillsides, of which rare and dwarfed specimens only are now to be found on the highest mountains; the Hornbeam, the Beech, and Alder of Homer; and, with scanty exceptions, the ‘spear-furnishing’ Cornel and the tall Ash. Instead of these, another class of plants has conquered for itself greater space in the vegetable realm—thick-leaved, hard-leaved, down-covered, thorny and prickly bushes, evergreen for the most part, and adding, by their rich flowers, great beauty to the spring. This vegetation, analogous to that of the American savannas and Asiatic steppes, has now replaced the ancient flowery meadows, resembling those of middle Europe, with wastes of heath and pines, carob-trees and grey oleasters. Together with these we have the various kinds of arbutus, myrtle, oleander, philyreæ, pistachios, kermes-oaks, rosemary, thyme, and the flora of dry mountain regions in general.”
Let us now see how far the historical indications furnished by the Pompeian relics corroborate what has been already said respecting this “intrusion of the climate of the South,” as Fraas terms it, into the regions north of the Mediterranean.
In order to ascertain the plants known to the citizens of Pompeii, says Schouw, two records remain to us—namely, the pictures discovered in its ruins, and the remnants of plants themselves. But, he adds, the use of the first requires some care:—“Many representations of plants are naturally so little precise that their particular species cannot be ascertained, as would be the case in modern pictures of the same kind. And, if the plant be recognisable, it does not follow as certain that it was known at Pompeii, for the plants of foreign countries are also occasionally represented. Thus the Nile-nature is often delineated—marshy landscapes, with the lotus and the nelumbium, the hippopotamus, ichneumon, flocks of geese, and date-palms at the water’s edge; as, for instance, in the lower rim of the famous mosaic supposed to represent Alexander and Darius. Frequently, also, the representations are fanciful—for instance, a laurel growing out of a date-palm, and even appearing to rise out of it as a shoot from the same root—a physiological impossibility, unless, perhaps, it has reference to that strange practice of the ancients—the planting of different kinds so close to each other that they might appear to the eye connected.”
After making these allowances, we may safely arrive at the following conclusions. Among the trees which gave the Neapolitan landscape its character were then (as now) the stone-pine and the cypress. The former is frequently represented, with its peculiar branchless stems and cloud-like head—the product not only of close planting but of actual pruning in nurseries, as may now be noticed in the neighbourhood of Naples. This tree was cultivated for its edible nuts; and pine cones have been found among the charred objects in the shops of Pompeii. The beautiful cypress often occurs in the Pompeian frescoes, not unfrequently mingled with the pine, and gracefully combining with the outlines of the fanciful villas and temples represented. It is Gilpin, we think, who points out the peculiar adaptation, by contrast, of the spiral cypress and poplar to the long horizontal lines of southern buildings; while the square masses of the lime and elm combine well with the pointed Gothic. The “Pinus halepensis,” adds Schouw (the common maritime pine of Italy), is also found in these pictures. The vine, of course, occurs constantly—so does the olive. They were, no doubt, as universal then as now; and preferred respectively, as they do now, the volcanic and the calcareous hills in the vicinity of Naples. Preserved olives were found in Pompeii, which even retained something of their taste. The myrtle, and the beautiful oleander, or laurel-rose, as the French call it—common shrubs of to-day—also appear in the frescoes. Add to these the laurel and bay tribe, the ilex, fig, pomegranate, the “arundo donax” or gigantic reed—cultivated then as now for its various uses, and covering the marshy grounds with its dense brake, strange to the northern eye, are most of them recognisable also in these pictures. And we are enabled to say that the common vegetable forms on which the eye of the Pompeian citizen rested were, to this extent, similar to those on which his descendant gazes now.
But there were many species, now common, then rare or unknown, some of which are mentioned by Schouw in the little essay before us; others, we are able to add, from different sources. The aloe or agave, and the Indian fig (figue de Barbarie, as the French call it), are now among the familiar plants of maritime Italy. The former vigorously protrudes itself in every stony, solitary spot, from the old ramparts of Genoa to the lava-fields of Aeta; the latter is half-cultivated in a careless sort of way for its luscious bulb; and the two seem, in many places, to have almost extirpated the older vegetation. Both of these lusty children of the South are of quite modern origin in Italy, having come over from America. Some have fancied that the pineapple is represented in one Pompeian fresco. “But this,” says our Professor, “is undoubtedly the edible crown of a young dwarf palm, or chamærops humilis.”
A still more important want of classical ages was that of the whole tribe of Agrumi, as the Italians call them—the orange, lemon, citron, and so forth. “Italy was not then,” says our Professor, “the land
Wo die Citronen blühn,
Im dunkeln Laub die gold-orangen glühn;”