July 4, 1SS8.] 



Garden and Forest. 



22' 



earth, and about as unlike a New England garden in the 

 nature of the plants which adorn it as it is possible to 

 imagine. It is the entrance to the Botanical Garden at 

 Peradenia, near the famous city of Kandy, in the Island 01 

 Ceylon, where for seventy years the British Government 

 has maintained one of the most important botanical estab- 

 lishments in the tropics. The Mahavelli River flows round 

 the garden, which occupies a horseshoe-shaped peninsula 

 among the mountains, and which on the land side is pro- 

 tected by impenetrable thickets of Bamboo. The climate 

 is admirably adapted to insure the vigorous growth ot 

 tropical plants, which are found here of a vigor and size 

 rarely attained in other tropical gardens. Peradenia differs 

 widely in arrangement from most of the so-cnlleil botani- 

 cal gardens of the world. The plants are not huddled 



thirty buttresses, from which huge snake-like roots spread 

 out over the surface of the ground for a ilistancc of one or 

 two hundred feet. It is the ".Snake-tree" of the natives. 

 The collection of Palms in this garden, from both the olil and 

 the new worlds, is very large, and not the least remarkable 

 is the native Talipot Palm {Corypha unihracuUfera), ^\•hich, 

 unfortunately, does not ajipear in our illustration, ko other 

 tree, perhaps, presents a more striking and remarkable 

 spectacle than the Talipot when it shoots up its giant 

 inflorescence high above the top of the mountain forests in 

 which it glows. The trunk is perfectly straight and pure 

 white, like a marble column, supporting at its summit, 

 often one hundred and fifty feet from the ground, a crown 

 of fan-shaped leaves, which, on fully grown specimens, 

 have a surface of 150 to 200 square feet, and from which, 



A Tiitpical Garden. — See page 



together in formal beds, but are grouped naturally through 

 the garden, which is about one hundred and fifty acres in 

 extent, and produces a broad, park-like effect. The great 

 clumps of different species of Palms near the entrance will 

 serve to indicate how the most important natural groups ot 

 plants are managed in this truly noble garden, and to show 

 to our readers some of the beauties of tropical vegetation. 

 The large tree, the top of which appears at the left of the 

 picture above the Palm in the foreground, is the Ficus elas- 

 tica or Rubber-plant, so commonly grown in this country 

 as a small pot-plant for the decoration of living rooms. In 

 its home in the tropics it attains the size of a noble forest 

 tree, often a hundred feet in height, with an enormous leafy 

 crown borne on branches spreading out horizontally forty 

 or fifty feet from a ponderous stem, supported on twenty or 



once in the life-time of the tree — generally when it is sev- 

 enty or eighty years old— shoots up a pyramidal inflor- 

 escence thirty or forty feet in height, and covered with 

 countless myriads of small yellow-white flowers. When 

 the seed is npe the tree dies. The "Ola" paper of the 

 Cinghalese was made from the leaves of this tree : and all 

 the old Paskala manuscripts in the Buddhist monasteries 

 on the island were written with an iron stylus on paper 

 made by boiling narrow strips of Talipot leaves. \\'c shall 

 hope on another occasion to illustrate some of the remark- 

 able plants in the Peradenia garden. 



" Everything made by man's hand has a form whicli must be 

 beautiful or ligly : beautiful if it is in accord with nature and 

 helps her; ugly if it is discordant with nature and thwarts her." 



