JOUENAL 



OF THE 



Royal Hoeticultural Society. 



Vol. XXXVIII. 1912. 

 Pabi I. 



PLANT LIFE IN A TEOPIOAL ISLAND. 

 By SiE EvERAED iM Thuen, K.C.M.G., O.B. 

 [Read February 6, 1912; Sir Trevor Lawrence, Bart., K.C.V.O., in the Chair.] 



The following is an attempt to describe the vegetation which an 

 intelligent plant-lover might see during a brief visit — say of a week — 

 to an island in the South Seas, provided that the traveller had with 

 him a local resident able and willing to explain about the more note- 

 worthy plants. I choose Fiji, or rather Viti Levu — which is the 

 largest island of the Fiji group — because I know it best, since it was 

 recently my headquarters for some six years. 



The island is about eighty-five miles long by about sixty broad. 

 Like most of the Fiji islands it is high and rocky, of volcanic origin, 

 though its fires are now extinct or at least dormant, and it has round 

 it an almost unbroken fringe of coral. Its highest ridges, rising to 

 between four and five thousand feet, run along the north and north- 

 west coast; and it is from this main ridge that the two main river 

 systems of the island originate, and run deviously through many 

 narrow ravines, broadening valleys, and final wide ravines, to the sea 

 on the southern shore. 



It is from the south-east that the rain-laden winds chiefly blow ; 

 these are caught and condensed by the mountains of the northern 

 coast; the strip of country, of varying breadth, which lies north 

 of the mountains, between these and the sea, being sheltered from 

 the rain-laden southern winds, and, on the other hand, fully exposed 

 to the hot and dry winds from the equator, is comparatively dry. 

 It will be found that the vegetation varies in accordance with this 

 distribution of the rainfall. 



Suva, the only town and till lately the only port for sea-going 

 vessels in this island, is on the south coast ; and it is here that the 



VOL. XXXVIII. B 



