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Updated: June 3, 2025
Towards Abbazia the red soil becomes more abundant, the hills are terraced, and vegetation is more luxuriant, great chestnuts and bay-trees appear, and cypresses when Lovrana is reached. This north shore of the Quarnero, stretching to Fiume, is the Riviera of Austria. The Dinaric Alps surround it from Monte Maggiore, and the Liburnian Karst to the Velebits.
At sunrise, and again late at night, the scent of the sweet bay-trees filled the cañon, and the down-blowing night wind must have borne it hundreds of feet into the outer air. All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted.
There are trellis-work arbours and walks covered with leafy vines or other trailing plants. There are clumps of bay-trees, plane trees, or myrtles, with marble seats beneath. There is either an avenue or a covered colonnade, where the ground is made of soft earth or sand, and where the family may take exercise by being carried in a litter up and down in the open or under the shade.
He had stared for a little at the outside painted a good cream colour, with two peacock-blue tubs containing little bay-trees in a recessed doorway and at the words 'Restaurant Bretagne' above them in gold letters, rather favourably impressed.
And in the hedges are great bay-trees; and inside them, orchards of standard fig and white mulberry, with its long yearling shoots of glorious green soon to be stripped bare for the silkworms; and here and there long lines of cypresses, black against the bright green plain and bright blue sky. No; you are not in Britain. But come back; for the air even here is suggestive of cholera and fever.
In the bamboo clumps the jaguars play with their cubs, and on the outskirts of the swamps the peccary, a sort of small pig, jumps on his long, supple legs. A dark-green gloom prevails under the tall bay-trees, and their stems stand under their crowns like the columns of a church nave. There thrive mimosas and various species of fig, and climbing palms are not ashamed of their inquisitiveness.
Without, covered with grass, is a square platform, protected by a machicolated parapet of turreted stone-work. In the centre rises a cluster of ancient bay-trees, fresh and luxuriant, spite of the wind and storms of centuries. The count leaped out upon the greensward and rushed to the parapet. "How beautiful!" he exclaimed, throwing back his head and drawing in the warm air.
In his novel "The Blind Spot," Justus Miles Forman gives the following very charming picture of the place: "It was a broad terrace paved with red brick that was stained and a little mossy, so that it looked much older than it had any right to, and along its outer border there were bay-trees set in big Italian terracotta jars; but the bay-trees were placed far apart so that they should not mask the view, and that was wise, for it was a fine view.
Somehow, at sight of it, I found myself seeking the shadow just as he had done a short time before, and it was in one of the recesses made by a row of bay-trees that we came face to face. He gave me one look, then his eyes dropped. "Miss Camerden has lost a pin from her hair," he impressively explained to me.
Not, indeed, within a walk of my clump of bay-trees on the Fiesole hill; but in a country which has some of that Tuscan grace and serene austerity, with its Tweed, clear and rapid in the wide shingly bed, with its volcanic cones of the Eildons, pale and distinct in the distance: river and hills which remind me of the valley where the bay-trees grow, and bring to my mind all that which the bay-trees stand for.
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