IN FLORIDA 83 
the seat and talks to them, and sometimes they chatter at him 
in reply. 
There are about three and a half acres of swamp and low land 
- on the place, reaching from the high hammock to the bay. The 
former owner had cut down the timber on most of this area, and 
it lay a festering, rotting, tangled mass in the mud and saw grass, 
grown over in part with thorny Smilax vines. I hardly knew 
what to do with it but while I was busy with other matters new 
growth began to spring up from the stumps and I conceived the 
idea of making of it a sort of low hammock park. This idea has 
been carried out as I could get time to attend to it; a large variety 
of ornamental trees and shrubs suitable to salt marsh were 
planted, two pools were dug and a half mile or so of walk of 
broken rock was made. A rough rock bridge was built over a 
narrow part of one of the pools and a couple of similarly con- 
structed seats were made. A small piece of mangrove forest was 
left standing by the former owner and of course this was not 
disturbed. Already this lowland hammock is beginning to fore- 
shadow the beauty that is to come. 
Here within an area of a half dozen acres there are growing 
wild over eighty species of trees and large shrubs which some- 
times attain to tree-like proportions, a larger number, I have no 
doubt, than can be found in any state in the Union lying north 
of the fortieth parallel. There are places in the hammock where 
within a radius of thirty feet fully that number of species of 
trees are growing wild. Some half dozen species of these trees 
are naturalized in Florida from other warm countries; the rest 
are native. There are some seventeen species belonging to the 
low land and fifty that are strictly tropical. 
To me the hammock is, by far, the most attractive part of my 
garden, it is the part which is nearest to nature; the jungle is the 
thing that visitors ask after and rave over. When I am lonely 
and depressed I wander down into it to be alone with nature, to 
get away from the artificialities and annoyances of civilization, 
to let myself become a part and parcel of it all. I feel that the 
dear trees are my friends and comforters; I can take counsel with 
them and trust them; and I always come back to the world and 
its duties strengthened and refreshed. 
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