Palmetto Leaves Part 9

In the first place, the slippery sand-spirit has been caught, and confined under green gra.s.s-plats. The gra.s.s problem has been an earnest study with us ever since we came here. What gra.s.s will bear a steady blaze of the sun for six months, with the thermometer at a hundred and thirty or forty, is a question. It is perfectly easy, as we have proved by experiment, to raise flattering gra.s.s-plats of white clover, and even of the red-top, during the cool, charming months of January, February, and March; but their history will be summed up in the scriptural account--"which to day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven"--as soon as May begins.

The chances of an enduring sod for ornamental purposes are confined to two varieties,--the broad and the narrow leafed Bermuda gra.s.ses. These have roots that run either to the centre of the earth, or far enough in that direction for practical purposes; and are, besides, endowed with the faculty of throwing out roots at every joint, so that they spread rapidly. The broad-leafed kind is what is princ.i.p.ally employed in St.

Augustine; and we have seen beautifully-kept gardens where it is cut into borders, and where the gra.s.s-plats and croquet-grounds have been made of it to admirable advantage. A surface of green in this climate is doubly precious to the eye.

We were visiting in a house which is a model for a hot climate. A wide, cool hall runs through the centre; and wide verandas, both above and below, go around the whole four sides. From these we could look down at our leisure into the foliage of a row of Magnolia grandiflora, now in blossom. Ivy, honeysuckles, manrundia, and a host of other climbing-plants, make a bower of these outside corridors of the house.

The calla-lilies blossom almost daily in shaded spots; and beds of fragrant blue violets are never without flowers. Among the ornamental shrubbery we noticed the chaparral,--a th.o.r.n.y tree, with cl.u.s.ters of yellow blossoms, and long, drooping, peculiar leaves, resembling in effect the willow-leafed acacia. The banana has a value simply as an ornamental-leaf plant, quite apart from the consideration of its fruit, which one can buy, perhaps, better than one can raise, in this part of Florida; but it is glorious, when the thermometer is going up into the hundreds, to see the great, fresh, broad, cool leaves of the banana-tree leaping into life, and seeming to joy in existence. In groups of different sizes, they form most beautiful and effective shrubbery. The secret of gardening well here is to get things that love the sun. Plants that come originally from hot regions, and that rejoice the hotter it grows, are those to be sought for. The date-palm has many beautiful specimens in the gardens of St. Augustine. A date-palm, at near view, is as quaint and peculiar a specimen of Nature as one can imagine. Its trunk seems built up of great scales, in which ferns and vines root themselves, and twine and ramble, and hang in festoons. Above, the leaves, thirty feet long, fall in a feathery arch, and in the centre, like the waters of a fountain, shoot up bright, yellow, drooping branches that look like coral. These are the flower-stalks. The fruit, in this climate, does not ripen so as to be good for any thing.

One gentleman showed me a young palm, now six feet high, which he had raised from a seed of the common shop date, planted four years ago. In this same garden he showed me enormous rose-trees, which he had formed by budding the finest of the Bourbon ever-blooming roses in the native Florida rose. The growth in three years had been incredible; and these trees are an ever-springing fountain of fresh roses. There is a rose-tree in St. Augustine, in a little garden, which all the sight-seers go to see. It is a tree with a trunk about the size of an ordinary man's arm, and is said to have had a thousand roses on it at a time. Half that number will answer our purpose; and we will set it down at that. Rose-slugs and rose-bugs are pests unheard of here. The rose grows as in its native home. One very pretty feature of the houses here struck me agreeably. There is oftentimes a sort of shaded walk under half the house, opening upon the garden. You go up a dusty street, and stand at a door, which you expect will open into a hall. It opens, and a garden full of flowers and trees meets your view. The surprise is delightful. In one garden that we visited we saw a century-plant in bud. The stalk was nineteen feet high; and the blossoms seemed to promise to be similar to those of the yucca. The leaves are like the aloe, only longer, and twisted and contorted in a strange, weird fas.h.i.+on. On the whole, it looked as if it might have been one of the strange plants in Rappicini's garden in Padua.

The society in St. Augustine, though not extensive, is very delightful.

We met and were introduced to some very cultivated, agreeable people.

There is a fair prospect that the city will soon be united by railroad to Jacksonville, which will greatly add to the facility and convenience of living there. We recrossed the railroad at Tekoi, on our way home, in company with a party of gentlemen who are investigating that road with a view of putting capital into it, and so getting it into active running order. One of them informed me that he was also going to Indian River to explore, in view of the projected plan to unite it with the St. John's by means of a ca.n.a.l. Very sensibly he remarked, that, in order to really make up one's mind about Florida, one should see it in summer; to which we heartily a.s.sented.

By all these means this beautiful country is being laid open, and made accessible and inhabitable as a home and refuge for those who need it.

On the steamboat, coming back, we met the Florida Th.o.r.eau of whom we before spoke,--a devoted, enthusiastic lover of Nature as she reveals herself in the most secluded everglades and forests. He supports himself, and pays the expenses of his tours, by selling the curiosities of Nature which he obtains to the crowd of eager visitors who throng the hotels in winter. The feathers of the pink curlew, the heron, the crane, the teeth of alligators, the skins of deer, panther, and wild-cat, are among his trophies. He a.s.serted with vehemence that there were varieties of birds in Florida unknown as yet to any collection of natural history. He excited us greatly by speaking of a pair of pet pink curlews which had been tamed; also of a snow-white stork, with sky-blue epaulet on each shoulder, which is to be found in the everglades. He was going to spend the whole summer alone in these regions, or only with Indian guides; and seemed cheerful and enthusiastic. He should find plenty of cocoanuts, and would never need to have a fever if he would eat daily of the wild oranges which abound. If one only could go in spirit, and not in flesh, one would like to follow him into the everglades. The tropical forests of Florida contain visions and wonders of growth and glory never yet revealed to the eye of the common traveller, and which he who sees must risk much to explore. Our best wishes go with our enthusiast. May he live to tell us what he sees!

[Ill.u.s.tration]

OUR NEIGHBOR OVER THE WAY.

MANDARIN, May 14, 1872.

Our neighbor over the way is not, to be sure, quite so near or so observable as if one lived on Fifth Avenue or Broadway.

Between us and his cottage lie five good miles of molten silver in the shape of the St. John's River, outspread this morning in all its quivering sheen, glancing, dimpling, and sparkling, dotted with sail-boats, and occasionally ploughed by steamboats gliding like white swans back and forth across the distance.

Far over on the other side, where the wooded sh.o.r.es melt into pearly blue outlines, gleams out in the morning sun a white, glimmering spot about as big as a ninepence, which shows us where his cottage stands.

Thither we are going to make a morning visit. Our water-coach is now approaching the little wharf front of our house: and we sally forth equipped with our sun-umbrellas; for the middle of May here is like the middle of August at the North. The water-coach, or rather omnibus, is a little thimble of a steamer, built for pleasuring on the St. John's, called "The Mary Draper." She is a tiny sh.e.l.l of a thing, but with a nice, pretty cabin, and capable of carrying comfortably thirty or forty pa.s.sengers. During the height of the travelling-season "The Mary Draper"

is let out to parties of tourists, who choose thus at their leisure to explore the river, sailing, landing, rambling, exploring, hunting, fis.h.i.+ng, and perhaps inevitably flirting among the flowery nooks and palmetto-hammocks of the sh.o.r.e. We have seen her many a time coming gayly back from an excursion, with the voice of singing, and laugh of youths and maidens, resounding from her deck, flower-wreathed and flower-laden like some fabled bark from the fairy isles. But now, in the middle of May, the tourists are few; and so "The Mary Draper" has been turned into a sort of errand-boat, plying up and down the river to serve the needs and convenience of the permanent inhabitants. A flag shown upon our wharf brings her in at our need; and we step gayly on board, to be carried across to our neighbors.

We take our seats at the shaded end of the boat, and watch the retreating sh.o.r.e, with its gigantic live-oaks rising like a dome above the orange-orchards, its clouds of pink oleander-trees that seem every week to blossom fuller than the last; and for a little moment we can catch the snow-white glimmer of the great Cape jessamine-shrub that bends beneath the weight of flowers at the end of our veranda. Our little cottage looks like a rabbit's nest beside the monster oaks that shade it; but it is cosey to see them all out on the low veranda,--the Professor with his newspapers, the ladies with their worsteds and baskets, in fact the whole of our large family,--all reading, writing, working, in the shady covert of the orange-trees.

From time to time a handkerchief is waved on their part, and the signal returned on ours; and they follow our receding motions with a spygla.s.s.

Our life is so still and lonely here, that even so small an event as our crossing the river for a visit is all-absorbing.

But, after a little, our craft melts off into the distance, "The Mary Draper" looks to our friends no larger than a hazel-nut, and the trees of the other side loom up strong and tall in our eyes, and grow clearer and clearer; while our home, with its great live-oaks and its orange-groves, has all melted into a soft woolly haze of distance. Our next neighbor's great whitewashed barn is the only sign of habitation remaining; and that flashes out a mere s.h.i.+ning speck in the distance.

Now the boat comes up to Mr. ----'s wharf; and he is there to meet and welcome us.

One essential to every country-house on the St. John's is this accessory of a wharf and boathouse. The river is, for a greater or less distance from the sh.o.r.e, too shallow to admit the approach of steamboats; and wharves of fifty or a hundred feet in length are needed to enable pa.s.sengers to land.

The bottom of the river is of hard, sparkling white sand, into which spiles are easily driven; and the building and keeping-up of such a wharf is a trifling trouble and expense in a land where lumber is so plentiful.

Our friend Mr. ---- is, like many other old Floridian residents, originally from the North. In early youth he came to Florida a condemned and doomed consumptive, recovered his health, and has lived a long and happy life here, and acquired a handsome property.

He owns extensive tracts of rich and beautiful land on the west bank of the St. John's, between it and Jacksonville, destined, as that city grows and extends, to become of increasing value. His wife, like himself originally of Northern origin, has become perfectly acclimated and naturalized by years' residence at the South; and is to all intents and purposes, a Southern woman. They live all the year upon their place; those who formerly were their slaves settled peaceably around them as free laborers, still looking up to them for advice, depending on them for aid, and rendering to them the willing, well-paid services of freemen.

Their house is a simple white cottage, situated so as to command a n.o.ble view of the river. A long avenue of young live-oak-trees leads up from the river to the house. The ground is covered with a smooth, even turf of Bermuda gra.s.s,--the only kind that will endure the burning glare of the tropical summer. The walls of the house are covered with roses, now in full bloom. La Marque, cloth-of-gold, and many another kind, throw out their splendid cl.u.s.ters, and fill the air with fragrance. We find Mrs. ---- and her family on the veranda,--the usual reception-room in a Southern house. The house is the seat of hospitality; every room in it sure to be full, if not with the members of the family proper, then with guests from Jacksonville, who find, in this high, breezy situation, a charming retreat from the heat of the city.

One feature is characteristic of Southern houses, so far as we have seen. The ladies are enthusiastic plant-lovers; and the veranda is lined round with an array of boxes in which gardening experiments are carried on. Rare plants, slips, choice seedlings, are here nurtured and cared for. In fact, the burning power of the tropical sun, and the scalding, fine white sand, is such, that to put a tender plant or slip into it seems, in the words of Scripture, like casting it into the oven; and so there is everywhere more or less of this box-gardening.

The cottage was all in summer array; the carpets taken up and packed away, leaving the smooth, yellow pine floors clean and cool as the French parquets.

The plan of the cottage is the very common one of Southern houses. A wide, clear hall, furnished as a sitting-room, opening on a veranda on either end, goes through the house; and all the other rooms open upon it. We sat chatting, first on the veranda; and, as the sun grew hotter, retreated inward to the hall, and discussed flowers, farm, and dairy.

On the east bank of the St. John's, where our own residence is, immediately around Mandarin, the pasturage is poor, and the cattle diminutive and half starved. Knowing that our neighbor was an old resident, and enthusiastic stock-raiser and breeder, we came to him for knowledge on these subjects. Stock-breeding has received a great share of attention from the larger planters of Florida. The small breed of wild native Florida cattle has been crossed and improved by foreign stock imported at great expense. The Brahmin cattle of India, as coming from a tropical region, were thought specially adapted to the Floridian climate, and have thriven well here. By crossing these with the Durham and Ayrs.h.i.+re and the native cattle, fine varieties of animals have been obtained. Mr. ---- showed me a list of fifty of his finest cows, each one of which has its distinguis.h.i.+ng name, and with whose pedigree and peculiarities he seemed well acquainted.

In rearing, the Floridian system has always been to make every thing subservient to the increase of the herd. The calf is allowed to run with the cow; and the supply of milk for the human being is only what is over and above the wants of the calf. The usual mode of milking is to leave the calf sucking on one side, while the milker sits on the other, and gets his portion. It is an opinion fixed as fate in the mind of every negro cow-tender, that to kill a calf would be the death of the mother; and that, if you separate the calf from the mother, her milk will dry up. Fresh veal is a delicacy unheard of; and once, when we suggested a veal-pie to a strapping Ethiopian dairy-woman, she appeared as much shocked as if we had proposed to frica.s.see a baby. Mr. ----, however, expressed his conviction that the Northern method of taking off the calf, and securing the cow's milk, could be practised with success, and had been in one or two cases. The yield of milk of some of the best blood cows was quite equal to that of Northern milkers, and might be kept up by good feeding. As a rule, however, stock-raisers depend for their supply of milk more on the number of their herd than the quant.i.ty given by each. The expenses of raising are not heavy where there is a wide expanse of good pasture-land for them to range in, and no necessity for shelters of any kind through the year.

Mr. ---- spoke of the river-gra.s.s as being a real and valuable species of pasturage. On the west side of the river, the flats and shallows along by the sh.o.r.e are covered with a broad-leaved water-gra.s.s, very tender and nutritious, of which cattle are very fond. It is a curious sight to see whole herds of cows browsing in the water, as one may do every day along the course of this river.

The subject of dairy-keeping came up; and, at our request, Mrs. ---- led the way to hers. It is built out under a dense shade of trees in an airy situation, with double walls like an ice-house. The sight of the snowy shelves set round with pans, on which a rich golden cream was forming, was a sufficient testimony that there could be beautiful, well-kept dairies in Florida, notwithstanding its tropical heats.

The b.u.t.ter is made every morning at an early hour; and we had an opportunity of tasting it at the dinner-table. Like the best b.u.t.ter of France and England, it is sweet and pure, like solidified cream, and as different as can be from the hard, salty ma.s.s which most generally pa.s.ses for b.u.t.ter among us. The b.u.t.termilk of a daily churning is also sweet and rich, a delicious nouris.h.i.+ng drink, and an excellent adjuvant in the making of various cakes and other household delicacies.

Our friend's experience satisfied us that there was no earthly reason in the climate or surroundings of Florida why milk and b.u.t.ter should be the scarce and expensive luxuries they are now. What one private gentleman can do simply for his own comfort and that of his family, we should think might be repeated on a larger scale by somebody in the neighborhood of Jacksonville as a money speculation. Along the western bank of this river are hundreds of tracts of good grazing land, where cattle might be pastured at small expense; where the products of a dairy on a large scale would meet a ready and certain sale. At present the hotels and boarding-houses are supplied with condensed milk, and b.u.t.ter, imported from the North: and yet land is cheap here; labor is reasonable; the climate genial, requiring no outlay for shelter, and comparatively little necessity of storing food for winter. Fine breeds of animals of improved stock exist already, and can be indefinitely increased; and we wonder that n.o.body is to be found to improve the opportunity to run a stock and dairy farm which shall supply the hotels and boarding-houses of Jacksonville.

After visiting the dairy, we sauntered about, looking at the poultry-yards, where different breeds of hens, turkeys, pea-fowl, had each their allotted station. Four or five big dogs, hounds and pointers, trotted round with us, or rollicked with a party of grandchildren, a.s.sisted by the never-failing addition of a band of giggling little negroes. As in the old times, the servants of the family have their little houses back of the premises; and the laundry-work, &c., is carried on outside. The propensity at the South is to multiply little buildings. At the North, where there is a winter to be calculated on, the tactics of living are different. The effort is to gather all the needs and wants of life under one roof, to be warmed and kept in order at small expense. In the South, where building-material is cheap, and building is a slight matter, there is a separate little building for every thing; and the back part of an estate looks like an eruption of little houses. There is a milk-house, a corn-house, a tool-house, a bake-house, besides a house for each of the leading servants, making quite a village.

Our dinner was a bountiful display of the luxuries of a Southern farm,--finely-flavored fowl choicely cooked, fish from the river, soft-sh.e.l.l turtle-soup, with such a tempting variety of early vegetables as seemed to make it impossible to do justice to all. Mrs. ---- offered us a fine sparkling wine made of the juice of the wild-orange. In color it resembled the finest sherry, and was much like it in flavor.

We could not help thinking, as we refused dainty after dainty, from mere inability to take more, of the thoughtless way in which it is often said that there can be nothing fit to eat got in Florida.

Mr. ----'s family is supplied with food almost entirely from the products of his own farm. He has the nicest of fed beef, nice tender pork, poultry of all sorts, besides the resources of an ample, well-kept dairy. He raises and makes his own sirup. He has sweet-potatoes, corn, and all Northern vegetables, in perfection; peaches, grapes of finest quality, besides the strictly tropical fruits; and all that he has, any other farmer might also have with the same care.

After dinner we walked out to look at the grapes, which hung in profuse cl.u.s.ters, just beginning to ripen on the vines. On our way we stopped to admire a great bitter-sweet orange-tree, which seemed to make "Hesperian fables true." It was about thirty feet in height, and with branches that drooped to the ground, weighed down at the same time with great golden b.a.l.l.s of fruit, and wreaths of pearly buds and blossoms.

Every stage of fruit, from the tiny green ball of a month's growth to the perfected orange, were here; all the processes of life going on together in joyous unity. The tree exemplified what an orange-tree could become when fully fed, when its almost boundless capacity for digesting nutriment meets a full supply; and it certainly stood one of the most royal of trees. Its leaves were large, broad, and of that glossy, varnished green peculiar to the orange; and its young shoots looked like burnished gold. The bitter-sweet orange is much prized by some. The pulp is sweet, with a certain spicy flavor; but the rind, and all the inner membranes that contain the fruit, are bitter as quinine itself. It is held to be healthy to eat of both, as the acid and the bitter are held to be alike correctives of the bilious tendencies of the climate.

But the afternoon sun was casting the shadows the other way, and the little buzzing "Mary Draper" was seen puffing in the distance on her way back from Jacksonville; and we walked leisurely down the live-oak avenues to the wharf, our hands full of roses and Oriental jessamine, and many pleasant memories of our neighbors over the way.

And now in relation to the general subject of farming in Florida. Our own region east of the St. John's River is properly a little sandy belt of land, about eighteen miles wide, washed by the Atlantic Ocean on one side, and the St. John's River on the other. It is not by any means so well adapted to stock-farming or general farming as the western side of the river. Its princ.i.p.al value is in fruit-farming; and it will appear, by a voyage up the river, that all the finest old orange-groves and all the new orange-plantations are on the eastern side of the river.

The presence, on either side, of two great bodies of water, produces a more moist and equable climate, and less liability to frosts. In the great freeze of 1835, the orange-groves of the west bank were killed beyond recovery; while the fine groves of Mandarin sprang up again from the root, and have been vigorous bearers for years since.

But opposite Mandarin, along the western sh.o.r.e, lie miles and miles of splendid land--which in the olden time produced cotton of the finest quality, sugar, rice, sweet-potatoes--now growing back into forest with a tropical rapidity. The land lies high, and affords fine sites for dwellings; and the region is comparatively healthy. Then Hibernia, Magnolia, and Green Cove, on the one side, and Jacksonville on the other, show perfect a.s.semblages of boarding-houses and hotels, where ready market might be found for what good farmers might raise. A colony of farmers coming out and settling here together, bringing with them church and schoolhouse, with a minister skilled like St. Bernard both in husbandry and divinity, might soon create a thrifty farming-village. We will close this chapter with an extract from a letter of a Northern emigrant recently settled at Newport, on the north part of Appalachicola Bay.

SEPT. 22, 1872.

I have been haying this month: in fact I had mowed my orange-grove, a square of two acres, from time to time, all summer. But this month a field of two acres had a heavy burden of gra.s.s, with cow-pease intermixed. In some parts of the field, there certainly would be at the rate of three tons to the acre. The whole field would average one ton to the acre. So I went at it with a good Northern scythe, and mowed every morning an hour or two. The hay was perfectly cured by five P.M., same day, and put in barn. The land, being in ridges, made mowing difficult.

Next year I mean to lay that land down to gra.s.s, taking out stumps, and making smooth, sowing rye and clover. I shall plough it now as soon as the hay is all made, and sow the rye and clover immediately. I have five cows that give milk, and four that should come in soon. These, with their calves, I shall feed through the months when the gra.s.s is poor. I have also a yoke of oxen and four young steers, with Trim the mule. I have already in the barn three to four tons of hay and corn-fodder, and two acres of cow-pease cured, to be used as hay. I hope to have five hundred bushels of sweet-potatoes, which, for stock, are equal to corn. I made a hundred and ten bushels of corn, twenty-five to the acre. My cane is doing moderately well.

Hope to have all the seed I want to plant fourteen acres next year. Bananas thrive beautifully; shall have fifty offsets to set out this winter; also three or four thousand oranges, all large-sized and fair.

All these facts go to show, that, while Florida cannot compete with the Northern and Western States as a gra.s.s-raising State, yet there are other advantages in her climate and productions which make stock-farming feasible and profitable. The disadvantages of her burning climate may, to a degree, be evaded and overcome by the application of the same patient industry and ingenuity which rendered fruitful the iron soil and freezing climate of the New-England States.