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Updated: May 7, 2025
The church had been decked with moss fern the day before, but the flowers must be added in the morning, or they would be faded. So Julia and I made a crown of French marigolds to hang on the cross over the altar, two large wreaths for either side, and one at the west end made entirely of the golden allamanda, in the buds of which you used to imprison fire-flies when you lived here.
The blue duranta and the white oleander, the cool gray-green hibiscus with lemon-colored blossoms, the yellow allamanda, the trumpet lily, acacias, lilac ipomaea, tree ferns, and huge bird's-nest ferns mingled with white convolvulus, and over all lifted groves of cocoas and the symmetrical breadfruit.
For all over the flimsy wooden houses, the wretched palings, the galvanized iron roofing, the ugly verandas, hang gorgeous draperies of the giant acacias, the brilliant flamboyantes, the bountiful, yellow allamanda, the generous breadfruit, and the uplifting glory of the cocoanut-trees, while magnificent vines and creepers cover the tawdry paint of the façades and embower the homes in green and flower.
The mottled crotons, the yellow allamanda and pink hibiscus bushes, the clump of Eucharist lilies, the great trailing masses of orchids that hung among the red flowers of the stately flamboyant tree by the green hedge, joined to make me forget the midwinter date on the calendar. The time seemed in my half-dream July in New York or August in Washington.
Clumps of bamboo as big as a city lot and towering to the sky, with the yellow allamanda framing the bungalows, and a tangle of bananas, lantana, tafeie, cocoas, and a hundred other fruits, flowers and creepers, made the whole journey through a paradise. Around many cocoanut-palms were bands of tin or zinc ten or twenty feet from the earth. Every available piece of thin metal was used for this.
Tropic landscape gardening will supply that defect; and a hundred plants of yellow Allamanda, or purple Dolichos, or blue Clitoria, or crimson Norantea, set side by side, as we might use a hundred Calceolarias or Geraniums, will carry up the forest walls, and over the tree-tops, not square yards, but I had almost said square acres of richest positive colour.
Vivid orchids and wonderful colored lichens smoldered upon the swarthy tree-trunks and where a wandering shaft of light fell full upon the golden allamanda, the scarlet star-clusters of the tacsonia, or the rich deep blue of ipomaea, the effect was as a dream of fairyland. In these great wastes of forest, life, which abhors darkness, struggles ever upwards to the light.
The two words "Roman Catholicism" uttered aloud in the quiet June sunlight gave him the sensation of an allamanda or of a gardenia blossoming in an apple-tree. People who talked about bringing the English Church into line with the trend of Western Christianity lacked a sense of history.
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