VIRGINIA 77 



pear here as large, strong trees. The Melia Azedarach 

 (Bead-tree) is frequently planted before the doors of 

 houses, and this originally East Indian tree stands the 

 winters right well. In sundry gardens there are tea 

 shrubs,* which succeed very well, and multiply easily. 

 Besides the Hibiscus Syriacus, the Babylonian willow, 

 the box-tree, the myrtle, and one or two other plants, 

 I was able at this season of the year to recognize noth- 

 ing by way of foreign growths which it had been at- 

 tempted to domesticate. And nevertheless in the Vir- 

 ginia climate many useful and pleasant plants might be 

 made to do extremely well ; the domestic chesnut, the 

 round-leaved ash, the European wallnut tree, laurel- 

 cherry tree, the pomegranate, the bay tree, and many 

 others, would find a congenial home here. Of in- 

 digenous plants not one was to be seen in bloom ; ever- 

 greens excepted, everything was leafless and hibernate ; 

 and yet we were now below the 37 degree of latitude, 

 and thus 4 degrees to the south of Rome, round about 

 which, even at this time of the year, one can pluck 

 many sorts of flowers. 



* Later information gives assurance that in several parts of 

 the United States the culture of the tea-shrub has been gone 

 about assiduously and with good hopes of success ; chiefly for 

 the following reasons : China, like the American states, has a 

 surface extended to the west and northwest; and lies towards 

 the Southern Ocean precisely as the United States towards 

 the Atlantic ; these two countries are in the same latitude, 

 and in both (and nowhere else) is the ginseng indigenous, and 

 this last circumstance especially argues so great a similarity 

 of soil and climate as to permit the hope that the tea-shrub 

 will very likely thrive under American skies, at least the ex- 

 periment should be a tempting one. And it should not be for- 

 gotten that sugar-cane, the basis of the whole West Indian 

 trade, was originally also a stranger from the East. 



