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. 



