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Updated: May 23, 2025
He returned when Manoel spoke, and we went ashore, the montaria winding along a gloomy overshadowed water-path made by cutting away the lower branches and underwood. The foot-road to the houses was a narrow, sandy alley, bordered by trees of stupendous height, overrun with creepers, and having an unusual number of long air-roots dangling from the epiphytes on their branches.
Beyond the brushwood, which grows where the original forest has been cut down, there are large trees covered with numerous epiphytes Tillandsias, orchids, ferns, and a hundred others, that make every big tree an aerial garden.
Unfortunately with his epiphytes he brought down whole colonies of ants, and the Jamaican ant is a most pugnacious insect with abnormal biting powers. After I had been forced to disrobe behind some convenient greenery in order to rid myself of these aggressive little creatures, I was compelled to put a stern veto on further tree exploration.
Forster, who went to Ireland an ardent Home Ruler and came back as strong a Unionist. The Quaker became a fighting man, and the idealist a practical man, believing in facts as he had seen them and no longer in sentiments he could not realise in measures grounded on the necessities of good government, and not like so many epiphytes with their roots in the air.
Insects get drowned in this water, and the plants may derive some nourishment from their decomposing bodies, but I believe the principal object is to obtain a supply of moisture, as the roots of the plants do not hang down to the ground, like those of many other epiphytes in the tropics, nor are they provided with bulbs like the orchids.
No lianas hang from the trees, and, excepting a few narrow-leaved Tillandsias, no epiphytes nestle on the branches and trunks. Below, instead of shrubby palms, large-leaved heliconias, and curious melastomae, the ground was bare and brown from the fallen leaves of the pines, excepting that in some places light grass had sprung up; in others the common bracken-fern of Europe.
Yet here is my apple-tree supporting epiphytes and parasites and insects, protector and nurse of a goodly company; and birds nest on the branches thereof. The northern hemisphere is the home of the apple, particularly Central Europe, Canada, the United States.
The boughs of some are stretched forth at no great height over one's head, and are seen to be loaded with epiphytes; one orchid I noticed particularly, on account of its bright yellow flowers growing at the end of flower-stems several feet long.
I did not notice any provision in the leaves of the Bromeliaceous epiphytes of Chontales to ensure the capture of insects, but often saw their dead bodies in the water held at the base of the leaves, and any that came to drink would be very liable to slip into the water from off the nearly perpendicular side of the leaf and be drowned.
Phyllocactuses are therefore epiphytes when in a wild state, but under cultivation with us, they thrive best when planted in pots or in baskets the latter method being adapted for one or two smaller kinds. It is easy to imagine the gorgeousness of a group of these plants when seen enveloping a large tree-trunk, clothing it, as it were, with balls of brilliant or pure white flowers.
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