SPANISH GARDENS 15 



winter on a diet of horses, dogs, cats, and the like, ac- 

 cording to one historian! Which is convincing wit- 

 ness to their lack of energy or skill — or perhaps both 

 — and of native resourcefulness as well. For the "cab- 

 bage-tree palm" — Sabal Palmetto — which grows in all 

 the beauty of native abundance here, has an edible ter- 

 minal bud — Whence its vulgar name — while an arrow- 

 root plant is common; and both the white potato, na- 

 tive to South America and taken thence to Spain as 

 early, probably, as the middle of the sixteenth century, 

 and the sweet potato, cultivated here by the Indians 

 from prehistoric times, could have been grown with 

 certainly very little effort. 



But the Spaniards who had come to drive the hated 

 French protestants from the new world, were warriors 

 rather than workers, and townsmen rather than plant- 

 ers ; and what gardening there was in the earliest days 

 came as a result of the efforts of the mission priests 

 and Jesuit fathers — those soldiers of the Church who 

 were in their train — rather than from any domestic 

 inclination on the part of the citizens themselves. 

 Pedro Menendez de Aviles brought with him, when he 

 came on his errand of terrible and bloody zeal for the 

 faith in 1565 — a zeal backed by what strange stories 

 of treasure to be gotten in this mysterious land, with 

 its legendary fountain of eternal youth, who shall 

 guess? — twelve priests and four fathers of the Jesuit 



