The Biggest Of The Old Trees, Which I Shall Describe First, Was A Red
Willow Growing By Itself Within Forty Yards Of The House.
This is a
native tree, and derives its specific name _rubra,_ as well as its
vernacular name, from the reddish colour of the rough bark.
It grows
to a great size, like the black poplar, but has long narrow leaves
like those of the weeping willow. In summer I was never tired of
watching this tree, since high up in one of the branches, which in
those days seemed to me "so close against the sky," a scissor-tail
tyrant-bird always had its nest, and this high open exposed nest was a
constant attraction to the common brown carrion-hawk, called
_chimango_ - a hawk with the carrion-crow's habit of perpetually
loitering about in search of eggs and fledglings.
The scissor-tail is one of the most courageous of that hawk-hating,
violent-tempered tyrant-bird family, and every time a _chimango_
appeared, which was about forty times a day, he would sally out to
attack him in mid-air with amazing fury. The marauder driven off, he
would return to the tree to utter his triumphant rattling castanet-
like notes and (no doubt) to receive the congratulations of his mate;
then to settle down again to watch the sky for the appearance of the
next _chimango_.
A second red willow was the next largest tree in the plantation, but
of this willow I shall have more to say in a later chapter.
The tall Lombardy poplars were the most numerous of the older trees,
and grew in double rows, forming walks or avenues, on three sides of
the entire enclosed ground. There was also a cross-row of poplars
dividing the gardens and buildings from the plantation, and these were
the favourite nesting-trees of two of our best-loved birds - the
beautiful little goldfinch or Argentine siskin, and the bird called
firewood-gatherer by the natives on account of the enormous collection
of sticks which formed the nest.
Between the border poplar walk and the foss outside, there grew a
single row of trees of a very different kind - the black acacia, a rare
and singular tree, and of all our trees this one made the strongest
and sharpest impression on my mind as well as flesh, pricking its
image in me, so to speak. It had probably been planted originally by
the early first planter, and, I imagine, experimentally, as a possible
improvement on the wide-spreading disorderly aloe, a favourite with
the first settlers; but it is a wild lawless plant and had refused to
make a proper hedge. Some of these acacias had remained small and were
like old scraggy bushes, some were dwarfish trees, while others had
sprung up like the fabled bean-stalk and were as tall as the poplars
that grew side by side with them. These tall specimens had slender
boles and threw out their slender horizontal branches of great length
on all sides, from the roots to the crown, the branches and the bole
itself being armed with thorns two to four inches long, hard as iron,
black or chocolate-brown, polished and sharp as needles; and to make
itself more formidable every long thorn had two smaller thorns growing
out of it near the base, so that it was in shape like a round tapering
dagger with a crossguard to the handle. It was a terrible tree to
climb, yet, when a little older. I had to climb it a thousand times,
since there were certain birds which would make their nests in it,
often as high up as they could, and some of these were birds that laid
beautiful eggs, such as those of the Guira cuckoo, the size of
pullets' eggs, of the purest turquoise blue flecked with snowy white.
Among our old or ancient trees the peach was the favourite of the
whole house on account of the fruit it gave us in February and March,
also later, in April and May, when what we called our winter peach
ripened. Peach, quince, and cherry were the three favourite fruit-
trees in the colonial times, and all three were found in some of the
quintas or orchards of the old estancia houses. We had a score of
quince trees, with thick gnarled trunks and old twisted branches like
rams' horns, but the peach trees numbered about four to five hundred
and grew well apart from one another, and were certainly the largest I
have ever seen. Their size was equal to that of the oldest and largest
cherry trees one sees in certain favoured spots in Southern England,
where they grow not in close formation but wide apart with ample room
for the branches to spread on all sides.
The trees planted by a later generation, both shade and fruit, were
more varied. The most abundant was the mulberry, of which there were
many hundreds, mostly in rows, forming walks, and albeit of the same
species as our English mulberry they differed from it in the great
size and roughness of the leaves and in producing fruit of a much
smaller size. The taste of the fruit was also less luscious and it was
rarely eaten by our elders. We small children feasted on it, but it
was mostly for the birds. The mulberry was looked on as a shade, not a
fruit tree, and the other two most important shade trees, in number,
were the _acacia blanca,_ or false acacia, and the paradise tree or
pride of China. Besides these there was a row of eight or ten
ailanthus trees, or tree of heaven as it is sometimes called, with
tall white smooth trunk crowned with a cluster of palm-like foliage.
There was also a modern orchard, containing pear, apple, plum, and
cherry trees.
The entire plantation, the buildings included, comprising an area of
eight or nine acres, was surrounded by an immense ditch or foss about
twelve feet deep and twenty to thirty feet wide.
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