152 Coffee Planting. 



far from its having produced any influence, planters 

 generally have all along shown great unwillingness 

 to recognize the advantage of shade under any 

 circumstances ; and those few wise enough to adopt 

 it, in such districts as Munzerabad and elsewhere, 

 have been looked upon as quite old-fashioned and 

 fanciful. The reason of this perhaps is the fact of 

 the native gardens being always under shade, the 

 tendency of the European planter being to regard 

 with the utmost contempt all idea of instruction 

 coming from such a quarter. 



This of course is a great mistake. Were the 

 coffee-plant a product of Northern Europe, like 

 ourselves, the prejudice might be intelligible ; but 

 inasmuch as it is a strictly tropical plant, the Euro- 

 pean might be supposed to be eager to learn some- 

 thing of its habits and requirements from native 

 experience, and to follow the native method ,as 

 closely as possible in the first instance experi- 

 mentally at any rate. That the natives were right 

 in adopting shade is clear enough. Their gardens 

 are nearly always found in hot, low-lying situations, or 

 precisely those in which the plants might naturally 

 be expected to die out most rapidly from exhaus- 

 tion ; and yet, protected by fine old Jacks and 

 other wide-spreading trees, they will often be found 

 stocked with coffee of time immemorial growth, and 

 which is still vigorous after having outlived gene- 



