Shade, However, Is The Great Luxury Of A Warm Climate, And Why The People
Of Cuba Do Not Surround Their Habitations In The Country, In The Villages,
And In The Environs Of The Large Towns, With A Dense Umbrage Of Trees, I
Confess I Do Not Exactly Understand.
In their rich soil, and in their
perpetually genial climate, trees grow with great rapidity, and they have
many noble ones both for size and foliage.
The royal palm, with its tall
straight columnar trunk of a whitish hue, only uplifts a Corinthian
capital of leaves, and casts but a narrow shadow; but it mingles finely
with other trees, and planted in avenues, forms a colonnade nobler than
any of the porticoes to the ancient Egyptian temples. There is no thicker
foliage or fresher green than that of the mango, which daily drops its
abundant fruit for several months in the year, and the mamey and the
sapote, fruit-trees also, are in leaf during the whole of the dry season;
even the Indian fig, which clasps and kills the largest trees of the
forest, and at last takes their place, a stately tree with a stout trunk
of its own, has its unfading leaf of vivid green.
It is impossible to avoid an expression of impatience that these trees
have not been formed into groups, embowering the dwellings, and into
groves, through which the beams of the sun, here so fierce at noonday,
could not reach the ground beneath. There is in fact nothing of ornamental
cultivation in Cuba, except of the most formal kind.
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