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Updated: June 25, 2025
There is a very noble quality of green sappy and gemmy like some of Titian's or Giorgione's in the stuffs they use. Their build and carriage are worthy of goddesses. Rain falls heavily, persistently. We must ride on donkeys, in waterproofs, to Monte Cassino. Mountain and valley, oak wood and ilex grove, lentisk thicket and winding river-bed, are drowned alike in soft-descending, soaking rain.
Peter's from the old wall near by the ilex avenue, or making excursions to Frascati, Tusculum, and Albano, or spending a day in wandering among the ruins of the Etruscan city of Veii, lost to the world so long ago that even the site of it was unknown to the Caesars, or strolling by the shore at Ostia, or under the magnificent pineta at Castel Fusano, whose lofty trees repeat, as in a dream, the sound of the blue Mediterranean that washes the coast at half a mile distant.
The gardeners to-day had rooted up the geraniums and dug over the empty flower beds, just below, preparatory to planting them with bulbs for spring blossoming. The keen, pungent scent of the newly-turned earth hung in the humid air, as, mingling with it a less agreeable incense did the reek of the mud-flats. On the right the twin ilex trees formed a mass of soft imponderable gloom.
A network of air roots makes a grotesque circle round the spreading boughs of the banyan grove, mahogany and sandal-wood, ebony and cork, ginger-tree and cardamom, mingle their varied foliage, the translucency of sun-smitten green shading through deepening tones into the sombre tints of ilex and pine with exquisite gradation.
They often paused to contemplate these stupendous scenes, and, seated on some wild cliff, where only the ilex or the larch could flourish, looked over dark forests of fir, and precipices where human foot had never wandered, into the glen so deep that the thunder of the torrent, which was seen to foam along the bottom was scarcely heard to murmur.
The unchanged vegetation, the background of dark olive woods, the masses of ilex, the golden globes of the orange hanging over the garden wall, are all so many distinct gains to an eye which has associated winter with leafless boughs and a bare landscape. One has almost a boyish delight in plucking roses at Christmas or hunting for violets along the hedges on New Year's Day.
Feeble, but sane and cheerful, he awoke, And took our hands and asked to feel the sun; And where the ilex spreads a gracious shade We placed him, wrapped and pillowed; and he heard The charm of birds, the whisper of the vines, The ripple of the blue Propontic sea.
Cistus, myrtle and cactus; cytisus, lentisk, arbutus; daphne, heath, broom, juniper and ilex these few I recognised, but there was no end to their varieties and none to their tangle of colours.
It had no flower-beds on it, but a cedar here, an ilex there, dark and substantial on their own dark shadows, and trellises and pillars overrun by a flood of roses of every shade, from deep crimson to snow white.
Is this a mechanical effect, or does it indicate a vegetable storgé to preserve its offspring? See note on Ilex, and Gloriosa. In the Meadia, the Borago, Cyclamen, Solanum, and many others, the filaments are very short compared with the slyle. Hence it became necessary, 1st. to furnish the stamens with long anthers. 2d.
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