172 
The Garden Magazine, November, 1923 
AS THE PHOENIX PALM GROWS IN UGANDA 
The lovely spraying Phoenix reclinata is common 
throughout tropical Africa while its kin (P. Roe- 
bilinii and P. rupicola) come from southeastern 
Asia and the Himalaya region (see preceding page) 
enterprise, his plantations of Tea, Coffee, Cocoa, 
Rubber, Cinchona and other plants of great econo¬ 
mic value is fast changing the face of the tropics 
even as his settling has caused wholesale changes in 
colder climes. The forests, which with few unim¬ 
portant exceptions once formed a broad equatorial 
belt thousands of miles wide, are fast disappearing, 
destroyed by fire and axe to make way for crops of 
more immediate commercial value. Those of us 
who have been privileged to drink in the solitude 
and grandeur of forest depths whether in the tropics 
or in temperate lands may well be envied, for to 
generations of a no very distant future such experi¬ 
ences will be impossible since the forests will have 
vanished. Cultivated crops of trees, be they for 
timber, rubber or what-not, are not more interest¬ 
ing than those of wheat or potatoes. 
Sometimes friends have said “you must have en¬ 
dured much hardship wandering in out of the way 
corners of the earth.” 1 have. But such count for 
nothing since 1 have lived in Nature’s boundless halls 
and drunk deeply of her pleasures. To wander 
through a tropical or temperate forest with tree- 
trunks more stately than a gothic column, beneath 
a canopy of foliage more lovely in its varied forms 
than the roof of any building fashioned by man, the 
welcome cool, the music of the babbling brook, 
the smell of mother earth, and the mixed odors 
of a myriad of (lowers—where does hardship figure when the reward 
is such? 
The Cycle of a Tropical Day 
T HE tropical jungle is impassable and aggravating in the extreme, 
but the virgin forest of the tropics is sublime. A typical tropical 
forest is mixed in character with broadleaf, chiefly evergreen, trees 
placed widely apart, their tall trunks mostly clothed with smooth barks, 
and often buttressed at the base or above and below the main limbs, 
bearing aloft a broad mass of branches interlocking with those of their 
neighbors and crowded with epiphytic plants in wondrous variety. Vast 
climbers with rope-like stems hundreds of feet long hang looped in serpen¬ 
tine coils, their leafy shoots sprawling over the tree-tops binding all 
into an interminable tangle. Looking down on such forests from some 
favorable eminence, flowers may be seen, but to what they belong it is 
often impossible to tell. From the forest floor little but a tangled mass of 
stems and foliage is discernible even with the aid of strong field-glasses. 
Palms are the common understory in these forests and with them are 
Tree-ferns, Bananas, and other shade-loving things with broad, sombre 
green, and curiously mottled leaves. Herbaceous plants—save Ferns, 
Mosses, and Selaginellas—are rare in tropical forests; shade-loving low 
shrubs with pretty but rarely conspicuous flowers may be there aplenty, 
but much of the floor of most of the forest depths is completely bare of 
vegetation and is a mass of decaying leaves, twigs, fallen flowers and fruits. 
In the tropics the sun is vertical overhead, or nearly so, the whole year 
round and the complete absence of shadows at noon strikes the traveller 
from the north as strange. Dawn breaks about half past five and in a 
quarter of an hour it 
seems full daylight. 
Suddenly the rim of the 
sun appears above the 
horizon and all nature is 
waked into activity—- 
birds chirp and scream, 
monkeys chatter, butter¬ 
flies flutter lazily around, 
and every creeping, 
crawling thing moves 
along; the air is cool and 
refreshing and it feels 
good to be alive. The 
sun rises rapidly, the heat 
manifests itself and in a 
few hours a drowsiness 
pervades the whole forest; 
about noon every voice 
is hushed and the forest 
stillness can be felt. 
More often than not a 
thunderstorm of short 
duration occurs in the 
afternoon and disappears 
as suddenly as it came 
but leaving the forest 
greatly refreshed and to¬ 
ward evening life revives 
again, sounds and music 
thrill the forest scene. 
About six o’clock the sun 
sets and within half an 
hour darkness is com¬ 
plete, silence reigns save 
for the croaking of some 
frog or noise of an oc¬ 
casional nocturnal ani- 
THE SAGO PALM mal ; 
The curious inflorescence of this Palm (Metroxy- Next da\ the same 
Ion laeve) is thrown up from the basal leaves to a phenomena repeat them- 
height of six feet or more (as shown above). The selves. There is perfect 
sago of commerce is made from the pith of . . . , 
these strangely flowering trees (see page 171) equilibrium ana monot- 
