The Trees And Plants Of The Jungle Were Very Exciting.
Ah!
What a
delight it is to see trees and plants at home which one has only seen
as the exotics of a hothouse, or read of in books! In the day's journey
I counted one hundred and twenty-six differing trees and shrubs,
fifty-three trailers, seventeen epiphytes, and twenty-eight ferns. I
saw more of the shrubs and epiphytes than I have yet done from the
altitude of an elephant's back. There was one Asplenium nidus [bird's
nest fern] which had thirty-seven perfect fronds radiating from a
centre, each frond from three and a quarter to five and a half feet
long, and varying from myrtle to the freshest tint of pea-green!
There was an orchid with hardly visible leaves, which bore six crowded
clusters of flowers close to the branch of the tree on which it grew;
each cluster composed of a number of spikes of red coral tipped with
pale green. In the openings there were small trees with gorgeous
erythrina-like flowers, glowing begonias, red lilies, a trailer with
trumpet-shaped blossoms of canary yellow, and a smaller trailer, which
climbs over everything that is not high, entwining itself with the blue
Thunbergia, and bearing on single stalks single blossoms,
primrose-shaped, of a salmon orange color with a velvety black centre.
In some places one came upon three varieties of nepenthes or "monkey
cups," some of their pitchers holding (I should think) a pint of fluid,
and most of them packed with the skeletons of betrayed guests; then in
moist places upon steel blue aspleniums and luxuriant selaginellas; and
then came caelogynes with white blossoms, white flowered dendrobiums
(crumentatum?), all growing on or clinging to trees, with
scarlet-veined bauhinias, caladiums, ginger worts, and aroids,
inclining one to make incessant exclamations of wonder and delight.
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