Though
resembling Italy in climate, it is wholly different in the appearance
of nature,--the plants, the birds, the animals, all different. The
green tidiness and culture of England here gives way to a wild and
rugged savageness of beauty. Every tree bursts forth with flowers;
wild vines and creepers execute delirious gambols, and weave and
interweave in interminable labyrinths. Yet here, in the great sandy
plains back of our house, there is a constant wondering sense of
beauty in the wild, wonderful growths of nature. First of all, the
pines--high as the stone pines of Italy--with long leaves, eighteen
inches long, through which there is a constant dreamy sound, as if of
dashing waters. Then the live-oaks and the water-oaks, narrow-leaved
evergreens, which grow to enormous size, and whose branches are draped
with long festoons of the gray moss. There is a great, wild park of
these trees back of us, which, with the dazzling, varnished green of
the new spring leaves and the swaying drapery of moss, looks like a
sort of enchanted grotto. Underneath grow up hollies and ornamental
flowering shrubs, and the yellow jessamine climbs into and over
everything with fragrant golden bells and buds, so that sometimes the
foliage of a tree is wholly hidden in its embrace.
This wild, wonderful, bright and vivid growth, that is all new,
strange, and unknown by name to me, has a charm for me.
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