In
reality, nine times out of ten, you might cast your eyes casually around
you in any tropical valley, and, if there didn't happen to be a native
cottage with a coco-nut grove and banana patch anywhere in the
neighbourhood, you would see nothing in the way of vegetation which you
mightn't see at home any day in Europe. But what painter would ever
venture to paint the tropics without the palm trees? He might just as
well try to paint the desert without the camels, or to represent St.
Sebastian without a sheaf of arrows sticking unperceived in the calm
centre of his unruffled bosom, to mark and emphasise his Sebastianic
personality.
Still, I will frankly admit that the banana itself, with its practically
almost identical relation, the plantain, is a real bit of tropical
foliage. I confess to a settled prejudice against the tropics generally,
but I allow the sunsets, the coco-nuts, and the bananas. The true stem
creeps underground, and sends up each year an upright branch, thickly
covered with majestic broad green leaves, somewhat like those of the
canna cultivated in our gardens as 'Indian shot,' but far larger,
nobler, and handsomer. They sometimes measure from six to ten feet in
length, and their thick midrib and strongly marked diverging veins give
them a very lordly and graceful appearance. But they are apt in practice
to suffer much from the fury of the tropical storms. The wind rips the
leaves up between the veins as far as the midrib in tangled tatters; so
that after a good hurricane they look more like coco-nut palm leaves
than like single broad masses of foliage as they ought properly to do.
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