VISITING THE GARDENS 163 



pigmy show of exotics in the East. Our most 

 tenderly nursed enclosures might cut a poor 

 figure in a climate that does its own gardening. 

 With all the money spent at Kew, one can 

 imagine what results might be produced, where, 

 outside of the Gardens, Miss North could draw 

 a picture far more highly coloured than anything 

 fairly to be said for Kew Green, or for the 

 Thames bank at Brentford. 



The view from the bridge in the very High Street of 

 Buitenzorg was the richest scene I ever saw. A rushing 

 river running deep down between high banks, covered 

 with a tangle of huge bamboos, palms, tree-ferns, bread- 

 fruit, bananas, and papaw trees, matted together with 

 creepers, every individual plant seeming finer and fresher 

 than other specimens of the same sort, and the larger such 

 plants were, the grander their curves. Then they had the 

 most exquisite little basket-work dwellings hidden away 

 amongst them, and in the distance was a bamboo bridge 

 a sort of magnified human spider's web. Looking 

 straight along the street from the bridge was another 

 pretty view little shops full of gaily coloured things, 

 such as scarlet janiboa fruit, yellow bananas, pomelas, 

 melons, pines, and hot peppers of the brightest reds and 

 greens. Pretty birds in bamboo cages, people in every 

 shade of purple, scarlet, pink, turquoise blue, emerald 

 green, and lemon yellow ; small copper-coloured children 

 carrying all their garments on the tops of their heads, 

 grass-cutters carrying inverted cones of green fastened to 

 their bamboos and almost hiding them. Long avenues 



