The Plant World 



A MONTHLY JOURNAL OF POPULAR BOTANY. 



VoL IV. JULY, 1901. No. 7. 



THE DRAGON-TREE OF OROTAVA. 



By Alice Caeter Cook. 



ON the Fortunate Islands, in the garden of the Hesperides, at the 

 end of the world, near the borders of eternal darkness, a strange 

 tree had been growing long before the time when, according to 

 accepted chronologies, the Garden of Eden was planted. Adam, Me- 

 thuselah, Noah and Abraham lived and died; Egyptians, Assyrians and 

 Persians built empires, temples and pyramids. The dazzling star of 

 Greece faded before the dawning light of Rome, which rose and set as 

 the world's great temporal power, to rise and set again as its spiritual 

 head; Europe awoke to intellectual life; England and America were 

 born. And while the whole procession of history was j^assing, the 

 strange tree grew on, slowly, steadily, in the wonderful valley of Oro- 

 tava. The spirit of the Peak of Tenerife brooded over it. The genius 

 of the people of the Island breathed through it. With the leisurely 

 assurance of infinite time, expanding at the rate of one foot in circum- 

 ference each three hundred years, it attained a girth of fifty feet at the 

 base. Its furrowed, conical trunk rose sixty feet into the air before 

 dividing into a circle of twelve giant arms, themselves measuring from 

 nine to eighteen feet in circumference and each bearing terminal 

 branches tipped with dense clusters of sharp, sword-like leaves two to 

 four feet long, and one to three inches broad. The whole crown was 

 two hundred feet in circumference. Aerial roots arising from the bases 

 of the branches covered and penetrated the stems below them, and at 

 length completely filled their cavities, becoming the real substance of 

 the tree as the soft tissues of a fossil ai"e supplanted by the silica of 



