_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—hence 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 
