Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 December 1884 — Fruits and Flowers of Portugal. [ARTICLE]

Fruits and Flowers of Portugal.

They possess, indeed, many fine orchards of fruit trees, and. groves of oranges and lemons, of olives and mulberries, and extensive forests of pine, chestnut, and cork trees; but they are far behind the Germans in forestal science; and the French, the masters of us all. in pomology. The Portuguese oranges grown in the interior are as large and good as those from St. Michael’s, but the oranges which come from the seaboard districts— the only ones ever exported to Great Britain — are poor in quality, for whi<!fo I can give no reason except bad cultivation, seeing that the best oranges in many other countries grow within the reach of the sea breezes. The olives of Portugal—an important food of the people—are gathered riper than in Spain, France, or Italy, and are small and dark-colored. They are probably more wholesome, and, in my opinion, far better to eat than the olives of any other country ; so good, indeed, and so cheap, that it is a wonder they are not brought to this country in the place of the hard and half-ripe and expensive olives of France. The oil obtained from them is generally badly made, but when purified, it is probably quite as good, though by no means as salable, as the fine oils of Italy. The climate of Portugal appears to be identical, in many respects, with that of Japan; and many Japanese shrubs and flowers, which dwindle and fail in the open air in France and England, grow magnificently in Portugal. Chief among them is the camellia, brought, it is said, about ninety years ago from Japan, .and often seen in Portugal of the size of a full-gro*ra apple tree. The camellia seems to require a rather damp climate and perhaps a granite soil, for the tree is a weakling in the dry air of Lisbon, but thrives close by at Cintra, and still better at Oporto, where many new and beautiful varieties are grown—among others, the sweet-scented kind, of whose existence no English gardener or botanist to whom I have spoken seems to be aware. Lovely as the flowers of the camellia are singly, the tree itself, in fnll bloom, is by no means an attractive sight. A camellia tree with a thousand flowers on it might be supposed, with its compact growth, its shiny leaves of rich green, to be an exquisitely beautiful object,. but it is nothing of the sort. The flowers, as they begin to fade, get to be of a dingy brown, and hang a long time on the tree, and a camellia tree has by far the largest proportion of its flowers withered and ugly. As a flowering shrub, „ the camellia is not comparable to the poinsettia, which blossoms to perfection in the Algarve provinces, with its mass of intense scarlet bloom, looking like a richly colored silken drapery hung on the branches of the tree, or to the white datura. A datura shrub in full bloom, with its thousands of pendent flower-beds reflected in a pool of water, is not soon to be forgotten.