TROPICAL GARDENS 



melon-shaped yellow fruits, their size varying with the species 

 (Plate 28, right). The fruit is always welcome at breakfast, as the 

 milk which oozes from the pulp is very beneficial, being rich in 

 pepsin. It has a delicious melon-like flavour, and is incomparably 

 sweet — at all events, in the north-east of Brazil ; southward of Rio 

 it is eaten with sugar, which seems ridiculous to the inhabitants of 

 Pernambuco. The Mamao is available all the year round in never- 

 failing abundance, and although I ate it every morning I never 

 tired of it. 



But the most important of all the tropical fruits, perhaps the 

 most important of all the fruits in the world, and also, probably, 

 the oldest, which was cultivated by man even in prehistoric times, 

 is the banana. The Banana or Musa family contains no less than 

 forty species, and of these there are again many varieties, so that 

 the European can form no idea of their number, nor even of their 

 flavour, since the finest of the tropical varieties will not stand 

 transport. There are dwarf bananas (Banana nana) with large 

 fruits, and large bananas with small fruits. One kind has pink pulp, 

 and tastes exactly like our raspberries ; others have an incomparable 

 and excessively delicate flavour; some are more succulent, others 

 floury, and they differ too in their degrees of sweetness. The "mealie" 

 bananas are not eaten raw, but are baked or boiled ; their flour is 

 made into bread or cakes. In Ceylon a most savoury rum pudding 

 is made with bananas. The amiable Benedictine sisters of Carnaru, 

 whose parent house is Tutzing on the Starnberger See, gave us, 

 after a genuinely Bavarian dinner of roast pork with sauerkraut 

 and home-brewed beer, a sort of apple-dumpling, but the apples 

 were replaced by bananas. 



Since the fruit of the cultivated banana contains no seed — a sign 

 of immemorial cultivation — the plants are propagated by means of 

 shoots. The banana, which is not a tree, but merely a tall bush, 

 flowers only once, then produces its fruit and dies. From the under- 

 ground runners, however, new plants spring up, and by means of 

 such propagation as much as two hundredweight of fruit may be 

 obtained from a single plant. Since the "tree" itself, with its great, 

 succulent, bright-green leaves, is very ornamental, and genuinely 

 tropical in appearance, it is sometimes set out, in summer, on 

 European lawns as an ornamental plant. The great leaves are held 

 together only by a marginal nervure, which is often broken by gusts 

 of wind, when the leaves are shredded to the midrib, and offer the 

 wind no further resistance ; otherwise the whole plant might be torn 



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