For the first two or three years the young palms must be well watered,
and the soil around them opened; after which the tall graceful stem
begins to rise rapidly into the open air. In this condition it may be
literally said to make the tropics--those fallacious tropics, I mean, of
painters and poets, of Enoch Arden and of Locksley Hall. You may observe
that whenever an artist wants to make a tropical picture, he puts a
group of coco-nut palms in the foreground, as much as to say, 'You see
there's no deception; these are the genuine unadulterated tropics.' But
as to painting the tropics without the palms, he might just as well
think of painting the desert without the camels. At eight or ten years
old the tree flowers, bearing blossoms of the ordinary palm type,
degraded likenesses of the lilies and yuccas, greenish and
inconspicuous, but visited by insects for the sake of their pollen. The
flower, however, is fertilised by the wind, which carries the pollen
grains from one bunch of blossoms to another. Then the nuts gradually
swell out to an enormous size, and ripen very slowly, even under the
brilliant tropical sun. (I will admit that the tropics are hot, though
in other respects I hold them to be arrant impostors, like that
precocious American youth who announced on his tenth birthday that in
his opinion life wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.) But the worst
thing about the coco-nut palm, the missionaries always say, is the
fatal fact that, when once fairly started, it goes on bearing fruit
uninterruptedly for forty years.
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