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twice A month.} YOL. II. ATLANTA, GA., NOVEMBER 15, 1882.
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HOME LIFE IN FLORIDA,
BY HELEN HARCOUBT.
Sixth Paper.
Unking n Horae,
One of the hardest things for a Northerner
to bear on first coming to Florida, is the ab
sence of the beautiful green turf and lawn,
so familiar to his sight that no country
home seems half a home without this grate
ful resting-place for the eyes. We are used
to seeing it ail around our old homes and in
great fields all over the land, and because wc
do not see the same in this newly-settled
country the cry has been raised, “grass will
not grow in Florida.” Now that is a great
mistake, and a great injustice done to a State
that only wants a chance given her to show
what she canr do in the way of raising
grasses.
If the fine lawn grasses so abundant now,
in the old settled Northern States, are in-
digenous and grow of themselves, just where
they are wan^ 1 as some unreasonable peo
ple seem to expect they should do in Florida,
how is it that the seedsmen advertise “ lawn
grass” seeds for sale, and the agricultural
papers are so particular each year to give
full directions as to the proper way of pre
paring the ground, and sowing the seed for
making lawns ?
We have spent a great many months ot our
life in the country at the North, and we
never yet saw a piece of woodland that hud
never been cleared, plowed or planted, that
could be utilized as a ready-made pasture for
cattle; where we see green fields and mead
ows, the gross has been .sowed there; it has
not sprung up by magic, and it has required
a good many years and a great deal of care to
make a good pasture at all. Yet much-ma
ligned Florida, even in her uncleared virgin
woodlands, does raise a grass that subsists
hundreds of thousands of cattle all the year
round, so that their owners are never at one
dollar of expense to keep them.
This is the fumous wiregrass that grows
evetywhere in the piney woods, tender and
nutritious when young, but tough enough
when old. It grows in tufts ; starting out
from the root in early spring, and keeps on
growing os fast as the cattle eat it, until late
in the fall, when it grows more slowly and
the cattle are apt to leave it and seek the
moss-draped hammocks for two or three
months.
Florida has other grasses too that are des
tined before long to supply her with all the
hay’she needs, some native, others imported
we shall speak of them fully by-and-by, but
at present we shall only speak of those that
make a close, thick turf, and can be made
important factors in the work of making
home beautiful.
Carpet grass is one of them; it is a native
of the country and makes a low, tolerably
close mat of green, but it does not grow even
ly as a lawn grass should do, nor will endure
uninjured even our light winters, so we do
not very much approve of carpet grass. We
want something better and more permanent
around our houses, and we find it in Bermu
da grass. Th|a is a flue, dark-green turfy
grass that in yearly growing more and more
in favor; the sole, objection to it, either as
lawn or pasture grass, being its habitof stray
ing out of bounds, aud this is a very small
matter in comparison yftth its real value, as
we shall hope to show our readers in due
time. We heard ot Bermuda grass when wo
first came to Florida, and there chanced to
be a small patch of it on our land, where
few roots, sent to the former owner from
Kentucky,' bad been carelessly stuck down
The patch was not a yard square and no more
was to be bad. But we wanted grass,
matter how little it might be. We felt lost
without our plat of green to rest the eyes on
when sitting on the porch, so two small plats
of the sandy soil were leveled off and en
closed by a border of strips, one on each side
of the broad path leading down to the lake-
let, and then the few roots of Bermuda were
planted in spots about twenty inches apart.
They looked very ridiculous at first, “little
dried up wisps of straw,” somebody called
them,with the bare sand dividing them from
each other, it seemed hopeless to expect ever
to see those desolate-looking plats covered
with grass. But the " little dried up wisps”
os soon os they recovered from their aston
ishment at being moved, put up tiny green
blades, and kept on trying to shake hands
with their neighbors, until, it} less than a
year, they succeeded in embracing each
other, ami uniting into one beautiful broth
erhood of emerald green turf. Another year,
and so luxuriant was its growth, that the
boundary strips were removed and leave
given it to roam whither it would, so now, a
fine large plat of deep green stretches out be
fore the house where, only four years ago,
was nothing bpt rough, weed-infested sand,
hard to walk on, ofttimes painfully hot to
the feet, and glaring to the eyes whenever
the sun was shining. The horses rejoice to
graze on it whenever permitted, the cows
and calves eagerly munch the sweet hay it
makes, when cut, as it has to be several
times each summer when it has grown up to
be eight or tfen inches high, children love to
roll on it, and visjtors exclaim, while won-
deringly rubbing their feet back and forth on
the short, springy turfs "I’ve never seen
anything like this in Florida.” But there is
no reason why it should not be seen all over
the State, wherever there is a house occupied
by people who want to make a home in the
land of their adoption.
If the grass does run out among the trees
it does, them no harm, if occasionally the
ground around them is hoed, so as to
loosen the soil. On the contrary, Bermuda
grass, allowed to !run over poor soil, will
enrich it by the old roots and grass blades
dying and decaying.
In the particular case we have referred to,
the creeping propensities of the one time
small plat ot green turf, are so far from be
ing regarded with terror, that they are being
encouraged, and a few years hence, from
present appearances, from house to lakelet
will be one beautiful lawn, refreshing to the
eyes and a thing of joy forever to the horses
or calves that may be tethered thereon
There will be trees in its midst, orange, pear,
peach, Japan plum, Japan persimmon; but
we have no fears of their being injured by
the grass, rather will their roots be shaded
and the ground mode richer by the turf that
will be hoed under around them.
We used to be told that a lawn of grass was
impossible in the piney woods of Florida
but we laugh at that idea now. The Bermu
da looks well all the year round, although
during the months of December and January
it stands still, and sometimes looks a little
weary of well doing, it never dies down so
entirely as to look dead and ugly; on poor
soil it spreads slowly, on good ground, or
with a top dressing of stable manure, ashes
or bone meal, it growB rapidly and tall. It
crowds out obnoxious weeds, and altogether
lends so pleasant and homelike an air to
one’s garden that we cannot too strongly
urge the Florida settler to plant Bermuda, or
or as it is really named after its introducer,
a sea captain, Permudy grass, close to their
houses.
“Familiarity breeds contempt," and we
are so accustomed to see grass around our
expanse of desolate, weed-grown sand, what
a great factor it is in our lives.
Looking at the great oleander trees, with
their stiff, dark-green leaves and bright pink
flowers, growing so luxuriantly without care
all the year round, “ out in the open,” it is
hard to realize that this is the same plant'
that'is so highly prized and so tenderly cared
f<Jr in our Northern homes. There they are
reared in boxes, and at the first approach of
cold weather, hurried off into the warmer
cellars, a specimen six feet high being're-
garded as a great possession.
Here, we see them everywhere, in every
yard of any pretensions, towering to the
height of thirty feet and loaded with blooms.
Their growth is very rapid, in four years on
poor soil a slip rooted in a bottle, will be
come a wide spreading tree ten feet high.
Delicate vines that will hardly grow at all in
tiie chilly North, here flourish in the wildest
luxuriance, and in our milder winters do
not even die down to tlie roots, and when
they do, set to work again in the spring just
as if nothing had happened to them
It is well known that the most beautiful
roses are the most tender, and cannot be
raised in the open air at the North, but here
they ru^piot, and not only so, but many of
the tea roses that are not supposed to be run
ners at all, become regular run aways and
clamber all over one’s porch or lattice work;
the glorious, fragrant queen of flowers,
peeping out here and there amidst a mass of
tangled vines in such unexpected places,
that vague ideas of a return of the days of
miracles float about in one’s mind, until a
close examination reveals the run-away rose
branch hiding slyly amidst the dense foliage
of another plant. In fact, the ways of the
denizens of the vegetable world in Florida,
are full of surprises to the ignorant Northern
mind, and their ways eccentric to the last
degree.
Morning glories that grow so luxuriantly
in the North become curious dwarfs here,
miniature plants that trail for two or three
feet on the ground and bear flowers propor
tionate in size. Cypress viues, so tender and
shy of growth in the North, in Florida run
rampant, climbing to the tops of fences and
lattice work, and then drooping downward
like beautiful feathery cascades of scarletand
green, or else rambles at will over the
ground in wild beauty, running up to the
tops of tail weeds, then down, and here, and
there and everywhere.
Tube roses, lilies and hyacinths, among
bulbous roots do well, and there are beauti
ful white lilies and pink lilies growing wild
in the hammocks that flourish when trails
planted to a flower bed. Tin .Jurna nox (good
night,) is a remarkably rapid growing vine,
with leaves shaped much like an ivy, set
singly about three inches apart, on a slim,
leathery, pliable stem, it is not only as we
have said, so rapid a grower that it is some
times called “railroad ivy,” but from the
base of each leaf twoar three stems start out,
each of which seems to vie with each other
as to which can travel the fastest. The re
sult is a fine, dense shade in an incredibly
short space of time, if one only has the pati
ence to keep pace with the long, down-
reaching stems that hang helplessly down
wards, waiting to be put up, like long hair
that has no curl to it.
The flower of the bona nox is as much of a
curiosity as the vine itself. It is large and
pure white, save for faint green bands that
mark it off in several divisions. It is shaped
like a shallow convolvulus, with its tips so
decidedly pointed, as when open, to present
a star-like appearance. It is a handsome,
waxy, showy flower, but the most curious
houses at the North, wherever there is room thing about it is, its manner of opening; it
for it, that we do not realize until wo see an | don’t do it at all in the quiet, respectable
way so fashionable in the world of flowers.
It reminds one of those jerky, excitable peo
ple who move through life on springs, who
bounce and thump over every little uneven
ness in their path,who cannot work quietly,
nor open a door save with a jerk. This is
just the way the bona nox behaves; from the
seed to the flower it grows with one continu
ous rush, as though running for a wager, and
the flower—well, you see the long, white bud
just as the sun has put his night-cap on and
and gone to bed, it is about three inches in
length, like a slender finger—you see it there
among the thick, green leaves, lying perdu
but the moment the bright luminary sinks
tojrest, the bud awakes to a sense of its own
impoliteness to the god of day, and lo I in an
instant, while you draw a breath, the bud is
gone and in its place a broad, white flower is
nodding “ bona nox,” "good night.” It is
like a transformation scene in a fairy tale,
one moment a bud,the next,in the twinkling
of an eye, the full blown flower. So quickly
does itopen that even when waiting on pur
pose to see it, one often fails, though some
times a slight tremor is visible, as though a
tiny elf were inside the bud, slyly casting
loose its bonds. Opening at sunset the
flower remains open until the sun rises again.
This curious vine is at the beck and call of
every one, for it is a native of the hammock
and readily propagated from the seed or
root.
Another native vine, also a strong grower,
and bearing a pink, convolvulus-shaped
flower, and a pretty shield-like leaf, is the
“eveningglory.” This, like the bona nox,
opens ufter the sun has sunk low in the west,
unless when the day proves to be that rare
thing in-Florida, a thoroughly cloudy day,
and then it remains open.
The yellow jessamine is another favorite
for home decoration, and abundant in the
hammocks, its quick growth, once It gets
started, its abundant, permanent foliage and
fragrant yellow flowers, and above all its
scornful disregard of frosty weather, which
makes sad havoc of the bona nox and even- .
ing glory, all combine to make it very de
sirable to train over our porches and arbors K
wherever needed.
The clematis, coral honeysuckle, Virginia
trumpet creeper and another trumpet
creeper that seems to have no particular
name, are also to be found in the hammocks,
and all of these native vines seem not to
mind their transfer to pine lands, but thrive
and grow apace.
The question of shade is of no small im
portance in a land whero three-fourths of
the year is summer, and where the sun
shines nearly every day. Occasionally the
new-comer is fortunate enough to find a few
large oak trees growing on the site he has
fixed on for bis house, and then if the latter
is built to the northeast of these, and not
very far away, their dense foliage will shield
the southern and western rooms from the
direct rays of the summer’s sun, a blessing
not to be despised.
As to the pine trees that may be on the
building site, they must come down, every
one of them, nay, we are wrong, a lightning
rod is wanted, and these'tall pines make very
effectiveones; there should be one leftstand
ing on each side of the house, deadened of
course, and so far away (but no farther,) that
if some day they come toppling down before
a lively breeze, they will not come
“ Tap, tap, tapping at tbe door,
. Splintering that and aometblns more."
In planting shade trees, and this is one of
the first things that should be done, no more
beautiful and no more rapid growers can be
found than the Texas umbrella tree and its
kindred,but less symmetrical tree, the CAfno-
berry. Their graceful, fern-like foliage, adds