2 S 
House & Garden 
THE GARDENS OF THE JUNGLE 
A B hole Gamut of Gardens Is Found in the Tropics , and from Them 
Be Draw Some of Our Loveliest Plants 
A MOST admirable servant of mine once 
risked his life to reach a magnificent 
Bornean orchid, and tried to poison me 
an hour later when he thought I was going to 
take the plant away from him. This does 
not mean necessarily that we should look with 
suspicion upon all gardeners and lovers of 
flowers. It emphasizes, rather, the fact of the 
universal and deep-rooted appreciation of the 
glories of the vegetable kingdom. Long before 
the fatal harvest time, I am certain that Eve 
must have plucked a spray of apple blossoms 
with perfect impunity. 
A vast amount of bad poetry and a much 
less quantity of excellent verse has been written 
about flowers, much of which follows to the 
letter Mark Twain’s injunction about Truth. 
It must be admitted that the relations existing 
between the honeysuckle and the bee are basely 
practical and wholly selfish. A butterfly’s ad¬ 
miration of a flower is no whit less than the 
blossom’s conscious appreciation of its own 
beauties. There are ants which spend most 
of their life making gardens, knowing the uses 
of fertilizers, mulching, planting seeds, exer¬ 
cising patience, recognizing the time of ripe¬ 
ness, and gathering the edible fruit. But this 
is underground, and the ants are blind. 
There is a bird, however—the Bower Bird 
of Australia—which appears to take real de¬ 
light in bright things, especially pebbles and 
flowers for their own sake. Its little lean-to, 
or bower of sticks, which has been built in 
our own Zoological Park in New York City, 
is fronted by a cleared space, which is usually 
mossy. To this it brings its colorful treasures, 
sometimes a score of bright star blossoms, 
which are renewed when faded and replaced 
by others. All this has, probably, something 
to do with courtship, which should inspire 
a sonnet. 
ROM the first pre-Egyptian who crudely 
scratched a lotus on his dish of clay, 
down to the jolly Feckenham men, the 
human race has given to flowers something 
more than idle curiosity, something less than 
mere earnest of fruit or berry. 
At twelve thousand feet I have seen one of my 
1 ibetans with nothing but a few shreds of straw 
between his bare feet and the snow, probe around 
the south edge of melting drifts until he found 
brilliant little primroses to stick behind his ears. 
I have been ushered into the little-used, musty 
best-parlor of a New England farmhouse, and 
seen fresh vases of homely, old-fashioned flow¬ 
ers—so recently placed for my edification, that 
drops of water still glistened like dewdrops on 
the dusty plush mat beneath. I have sat in 
the seat of honor of a Dyak communal house, 
looked up at the circle of all too recent heads, 
and seen a gay flower in each hollow eye socket, 
placed there for my approval. With a cluster 
of colored petals swaying in the breeze, one 
WILLIAM BEEBE 
may at times bridge centuries or span the earth. 
And now as I sit writing these words in mv 
jungle laboratory, a small dusky hand steals 
around an aquarium and deposits a beautiful 
spray of orchids on my table. The little face 
appears, and I can distinguish the high cheek 
bones of Indian blood, the flattened nose and 
slight kink of negro, and the faint trace of 
white—probably of some long forgotten Dutch 
sailor, who came and went to Guiana, while 
New \ork City was still a browsing ground 
for moose. 
So neither race nor age nor melange of blood 
can eradicate the love of flowers. It would 
be a wonderful thing to know about the first 
garden that ever was, and I wish that “best 
beloved” had demanded this. I am sure it 
was long before the day of dog, or cow, or 
horse, or even she who walked alone. The 
only way we can imagine it, is to go to some 
wild part of the earth, where are fortunate 
people who have never heard of seed catalogs 
or lawn mowers. 
ERE in British Guiana I can run the 
whole gamut of gardens, within a few 
miles of where I am writing. A mile 
above my laboratory up-river, is the thatched 
benab of an Akawai Indian—whose house is 
a roof, whose rooms are hammocks, whose 
estate is the jungle. Degas can speak English, 
and knows the use of my 28-gauge double 
barrel well enough to bring us a constant sup¬ 
ply of delicious bushmeat — peccary, deer, 
monkey, bush turkeys and agoutis. But 
Grandmother has no language but her native 
Akawai. She is a good friend of mine, and 
we hold long conversations, neither of us both¬ 
ering with the letter, but only the spirit of 
communication. She is a tiny person, bowed 
and wrinkled as only an old Indian squaw 
can be, always jolly and chuckling to herself, 
although Degas tells me that the world is 
gradually darkening for her. And she vainly 
begs me to clear the film which is slowly clos¬ 
ing over her eyes. She labors in a true land¬ 
scape garden—the small circle wrested with 
cutlass and fire from the great jungle, and 
kept free only by constant cutting of the vines 
and lianas which creep out almost in a night, 
like sinister octopus tentacles, to strangle the 
strange upstarts and rejungle the bit of sunlit 
glade. 
Although to the eye a mass of tangled vege¬ 
tation, an Indian’s garden may be resolved into 
several phases—all utterly practical, with color 
and flowers as mere by-products. First come 
the provisions, for if Degas were not hunting 
for me, and' eating my rations, he would be 
out with bow and blowpipe, or fish-hooks, 
while the women worked all day in the cassava 
field. It is his part to clear and burn the 
forest, it is hers to grub up the rich mold, 
to plant and to weed. Plots and beds are un¬ 
known, for in every direction are fallen trees, 
too large to burn or be chopped up, and great 
sprawling roots. Between these, sprouts of 
cassava and banana are stuck, and the yams 
and melons which form the food of these primi¬ 
tive people. Cassava is as vital to these In¬ 
dians as the air they breathe. It is their wheat 
and corn and rice, their soup and salad and 
dessert, their ice and their wine, for besides 
being their staple food, it provides casereep 
which preserves their meat, and piwarie which 
brightens life for them occasionally, or dims 
it if over-indulged in—which is equally true 
of food, or companionship, or the oxygen in 
the air we breathe. 
T) LSIDES this cultivation, Grandmother 
has a small group of plants which are 
only indirectly concerned with food. 
One is kunami, whose leaves are pounded into 
pulp, and used for poisoning the water of 
jungle streams, with the surprising result that 
the fish all leap out on the bank and can be 
gathered as one picks up nuts. When I first 
visited Grandmother’s garden, she had a few 
pitiful little cotton plants from whose stunted 
bolls she extracted every fibre and made a most 
excellent thread. In fact, when she made some 
bead aprons for me, she rejected my spool of 
cotton and chose her own, twisted between 
thumb and finger. I sent for seed of the big 
Sea Island cotton, and her face almost un¬ 
wrinkled with delight when she saw the 
packets with seed larger than she had ever 
known. 
Far off in one corner I make certain I have 
found beauty for beauty’s sake, a group of ex¬ 
quisite caladiums and amaryllis, beautiful 
flowers and rich green leaves with spots and 
slashes of white and crimson. But this is the 
hunter’s garden, and Grandmother has no part 
in it, perhaps is not even allowed to approach 
it. It is the beena garden—the charms for 
good luck in hunting. The similarity of the 
leaves to the head or other parts of deer or 
peccary or red-gilled fish, decide the most fa¬ 
vorable choice, and the acrid, smarting juice of 
the tuber rubbed into the skin, or the hooks and 
arrows anointed, is considered sufficient to 
produce the desired result. Long ago I dis¬ 
covered that this demand for immediate physi¬ 
cal sensation was a necessary corollary of 
doctoring, so I always give two medicines—one 
for its curative properties, and the other, bitter, 
sour, acid or anything disagreeable, for arous¬ 
ing and sustaining faith in my ability. 
The Indian’s medicine plants, like his irue 
name, he keeps to himself, and although I feel 
certain that Grandmother had somewhere a 
toothache bush, or pain leaves—yarbs and 
simples for various miseries—I could never 
discover them. Half a dozen tall tobacco 
plants brought from the far interior, eked out 
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