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Updated: May 2, 2025
You have seen the palms, the tall sword-palm with its great spike of snowy bloom in the spring, the fan-palm whose dried and trimmed leaves are really used for fans, and, perhaps, the date-palm. This tree was planted round the Missions by the Padres, and some, more than a hundred years old, are still standing at the San Gabriel Mission.
The flamboyant absolutely blazed in its gorgeous flowers, like ruddy flames, all over the grounds. The remarkable fan-palm spread out its branches like a peacock's tail, screening vistas here and there. Through these grounds flows a small swift stream, which has its rise in the mountains some miles inland, its bright and sparkling waters imparting an added beauty to the place.
No, it is a stream of a far different character, though also one of great magnitude. Upon the banks of the former ripens the rice-plant, and the sugar-cane waves its golden tassels high in the air. There, too, flourishes the giant reed, the fan-palm, and the broad-leafed magnolia, with its huge snow-white flowers. There the aspect is Southern, and the heat tropical for most part of the year.
Now we pass through a magnificent forest of the beautiful fan-palm the miriti overshadowing many smaller trees and innumerable shrubs, bearing light conspicuous flowers. Among them are numerous Leguminosae one of the most striking, the fava, having a colossal pod.
The esculent vegetables and fruits have been mentioned already, but the fan-palm requires more particular notice, for at certain times it is a succedaneum for all other food both to man and beast.
Trees, also, are rare, and of stunted growth; Figs, the Artocarpus and some Leguminosa prevail most. I saw but two kinds of palm, the fan-palm, and Phoenix: the latter is characteristic of the driest locality. Then, for the animal creation, men, women, and children abound, both on the banks, and plying up and down the Ganges.
At the same time his deep feeling for all things that have life, gave him new power in the delineation of external nature. The branching of flower-stems, the outlines of fig-leaves, the attitudes of beasts and birds in motion, the arching of the fan-palm, were rendered by him with the same consummate skill as the dimple on a cheek or the fine curves of a young man's lips.
He turned up an old botany book, and sought out the scientific names of different palms. CHAMAEROPS would not do, for it was a dwarf-palm; BORASSUS might do, seeing it was a boy only it stood for a FAN-PALM; CORYPHA would not be bad for a girl, only it was the name of a heathen goddess, and would not go well with the idea of a holy palmer.
The initial march was from Simbo, its terminus at Rehenneko, at the base of the Usagara mountains, six marches distant. The valley commences with broad undulations, covered with young forests of bamboo, which grow thickly along the streams, the dwarf fan-palm, the stately Palmyra, and the mgungu.
On the north, just behind the house, winds a black quagmire, a sinuous hollow, which in its deepest parts always contains water the muddy home of the brake-and-rush-loving "kiboko" or hippopotamus. Its banks, crowded with dwarf fan-palm, tall water-reeds, acacias, and tiger-grass, afford shelter to numerous aquatic birds, pelicans, &c.
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