PART IV 
PLANT COLLECTIONS ( TROPICAL AND WARM 
TEMPERATE) 
Tropical 
Vegetation. 
CHAPTER I 
THE PALM HOUSE 
Added to its own peculiar beauty of colour and form, plant-life in 
the tropics has for people of cool countries that other attraction which 
always belongs to the uncommon or the unknown. 
There is nothing in the flora of the British Isles that 
suggests to the inexpert eye the prevailing types of 
tropical vegetation as they are represented in this house — the palms, 
banana trees, cycads, screw-pines, and the giant bamboos. From 
the oaks and elms, the shrubs and flowers of the open air, it is a very 
different world one enters here. Forgetting this, those of us whose 
curiosity has been dulled by habit and familiarity are apt to be 
surprised at the crowds of people who go perspiring through this 
house on the hottest of summer days. 
The greatest difference between tropical vegetation as represented 
in the Palm House and that of Great Britain is the extraordinary 
development in the tropics of that great division of 
flowering plants commonly known as the endogens, 
but more properly as monocotyledons. In this great group the veins 
of the leaves are straight and parallel, and the stem does not increase 
in thickness by the addition of external layers as happens with the 
trees of northern Europe. The stems of woody monocotyledons do 
not increase in diameter indefinitely. Those of even the tallest 
palms and bamboos in this house, it will be noticed, are almost as 
thick towards the top as they are near the bottom. The only woody 
monocotyledon found wild in Britain is the butcher’s broom, an 
uncommon shrub two to three feet high, belonging to the lily family. 
It is a far cry from this, or the tallest of British grasses and rushes, to 
the monster palms, screw-pines, and bamboos of the tropical forest. 
130' 
Endogens. 
