202 
The Garden Magazine, December, 1923 
or here over the glorious crown of a Poinsettia and there through 
the foliage of a Banana tree, it is not surprising that a distinct 
inclination to tropical effects in gardening should have developed 
and functioned in high achievement. Public parks and large 
private residence grounds, because of the space needed for such 
landscaping, illustrate most strikingly the tropical tendency. 
But to a share in the same motif innumerable home places of far 
more modest extent throughout the state, and especially below 
the Tehachapi, attest. In wealth of Palms alone no other por¬ 
tion of the country can equal California, and none but Florida, 
perhaps, approach it. The Cactus is almost as ubiquitous, the 
Agave and Opuntia make an effort in the same direction. 
T HE show places of tropical aspect are many and the story 
of what some of them contain taxes an unused imagination. 
The San Gabriel Hills shelter the H. E. Huntington place with 
Cactus gardens covering five acres—more than 14,000 plants of 
them there in not fewer than 800 species. A Palm garden of 
similarly varied content is not far away. Near Santa Barbara 
one enters the residence park of J. M. Gillespie through an 
avenue of giant Palms, rising from a jungle of equatorial com¬ 
plexity, with flanking paths bordered in Bamboo. Great-leaved 
Banana trees, some thirty feet high, bearing their fruit in heavy 
clusters, help to grace an interior court. The “Tevis Bamboos” 
at Bakersfield show especially felicitous use of these trees, im¬ 
pressive both in diversity and number. Smiley Heights at 
Redlands is a mass of tropical and sub-tropical vegetation. 
Clear up at Stockton at the confluence of the Sacramento and 
San Joaquin, Rough-and-Ready Island is as reminiscent of the 
tropics in its plantations as of Bret Harte in its name. 
Public and semi-public plantings in almost every city in the 
state have participated to a greater or less extent as the location 
ranged toward the south or the north in the tropical vogue, as, 
for example, White’s Park at Riverside, with its 1,600 Cactuses 
in 473 varieties, and the botanical gardens at the upper end of the 
University of California, Berkeley, which are abundantly tropical. 
Northward to the very shadow of Shasta has extended the 
dominion of the Palm. I nnumerable grounds in cities higher even 
than the Fortieth parallel attest to the popularity of Phoenix can- 
ariensis, the majestic Canary Island 
Date Palm, the while they give the 
best evidence of its wide climatic 
adaptability. There is hardly a public 
square from end to end of the state, 
excepting along the mountainous re¬ 
gions, in which this or similar hardy 
Palms have not been used. The dimen¬ 
sions to which it attains in the West 
make its use as a street tree rather 
precarious if the planter expects to 
have anything in the street but Palm; 
yet as a lawn tree it has found favor 
with thousands. 
The common Cactuses are next most 
popular on the smaller home places, 
followed as one approaches the south 
by Agaves of various kinds and Aloes, 
then by the Opuntias. Grasses of 
tropical origin have been very widely 
used in all manner of places. Plants 
throughout this category in California 
have quite eclipsed the sort of growth 
that, in the East, is made to suggest 
equatorial landscape; Castor-Bean, 
Caladium, Egyptian Papyrus, and 
Cannas, for instance. 
M agnificence and luxuriance 
are the distinguishing stamp of 
vegetation in the thermal belt. The 
ideal tropical garden, then, wherever it 
is cultivated will assiduously attempt expression of these 
qualities, the while, like Japanese gardening, it actually 
essays a reproduction of native pictures. This would seem 
at first thought to demand an immense space, but tropical 
flora is so varied and in its adaptability so beneficent, that 
this is hardly true in practise. The succulents vary from 
those of a few inches growth, seemingly made for crevices in the 
rockery, to Century-plants that hurl their massive bulk full 
forty feet in the air. Of the Palms, one of the fan-leafed, the 
Chamaerops, for instance, contains the humilis which is of 
dwarf growth and the excelsa which rises thirty feet or more. 
If the aerial perspective is to be lofty, one will use Bamboos like 
Arundinaria falcata that grow to above twenty feet; and, if 
limited, will depend upon the six-foot feathery plumed Eulalia. 
This diversification, entering all of the families of tropical 
plants which have been found desirable in California, permits 
the home designer to decide precisely the sort of landscape ar¬ 
rangement he will adopt. His first consideration will naturally 
be whether all or most of his available space is to be made of 
tropical aspect or but a limited area therein, and this in turn will 
depend upon the reach of his grounds. 
A large space given over to tropical gardening should be large 
indeed. Most tropical plants are immense in their ultimate 
attainments whether their growth is slow or rapid. When it is 
set out the Phoenix canariensis, for example, may hardly be four 
feet high and not so great in width, but within a few years it 
will have risen to nearly ten times that height and will have 
hidden everything in a space forty feet wide behind it. The 
Abyssinian Banana (Musa ensete*), under the influence of 
California climatic conditions, carries leaves sometimes fifteen 
feet long and three feet wide or more. The gorgeous Poinciana 
regia at maturity has a trunk three feet in diameter and a height 
not less than the Phoenix. The five- or six-foot Grevillea of the 
East lengthens its trunk in California to fifty feet. 
But if one has not the space for a diversified showing of these 
luxuriant plants, he may still contrive a rockery out of Sedums, 
Cotyledons, the smaller Opuntias, Echeverias, and Aloes. 
Beyond it may rise Japanese Cape Palms, these flanked and sup¬ 
ported in turn by the lesser Cactuses. A water feature, if it is a 
portion of the design, may have a group 
of smaller Bamboos at one side and a 
clump of Pampas, or even a dwarfer 
grass, at the other. Thus, at least, the 
elements of a tropical garden are 
achieved, to be developed bit by bit 
with other plants upon which the 
owner’s fancy alights. 
While California as a whole extends 
to tropical plants the most winning 
hospitality, practical considerations of 
climate will dictate differing choices in 
different sections of the state. Gar- 
denesque California is not of one cli¬ 
mate but of innumerable climates, 
grouping themselves roughly into the 
three divisions of the great central 
valleys with a minimum of frost, the 
San Francisco and neighboring coast 
regions with little to speak of, and the 
great southern end of the state with 
practically none at all. 
Yet Californian tropical gardens can 
be made something more than mere 
Palms and Cactuses when Yuccas and 
many of the tenderer Agaves, Mag¬ 
nolias, and Bananas, thrive as far north 
as the latitude of Philadelphia or 
Baltimore, the Bougainvillea as far as 
*Named after Antonio Musa, physician to 
Octavius Augustus, first emperor of Rome 
(63-14 B. C.) 
PLANTS OF THE ARID DESERT 
Strange and fantastic in form are these natives of the tor¬ 
rid zone, even the tiny Aloes and Echeverias in the fore¬ 
ground contributing to the sense of unreality left upon 
the spectator of this bit of planting at Riverside (Cal.) 
