Perth Amboy evening news., 1904-02-17
RIVIERA VEGETATION
Some Notes of Interest from the Pen
of a Natarc-LOving TouriS
in Europe.


It. seemed to me that the poets of
the south have exaggerated the beauty
OF the olive tree. Indeed, l saw 10
beauty in it at all, said a writer in the
Conservator. The leaves look as if
they had been blancIed by sulphur,
and the trunks Of the shambling older
trees as if they had been hacked UP
with an ak. The younger trees are
more graceful, but don't appeal to the
sympathies of enc from the land OF
shapely spruce ana pines, the ash, the
maple and the elm. The splayed and
yawing fragments of an old olive trunk
have an uncanny look, as of some
nightmarish Dore illustration in
Dante's Inferno" The only lemon
groves I could set eyes on north of
Naples were n o. two at Cap dan
tibes, and two or three neal Mentone.
At Fiesole there was a garden full of
lemons grown in big terra Gotta tubs.
The oranges of the Riviera are
wretched, all the best fruit, heavy and
sweet juice, coming from Spain. ST.
oily and Jaffa. The grounds at Monte
Carlo are full of the fragrant pltto-
sporums. They scetn the air around
with tie very perfume of the orange
blossom, only it is not at all overpow-
ering or Extensively sweet, but delicate
and sense-quickening, like watts of
fresh frosty air.
We are so used to thinking of the
hawthorne hedge as a feature of Eng
fish landscape that | dare say it will
surprise many to be told that the
biancaspina is almost as common in
the Pisan plain and in parts of south
ern Italy-especially along railway
banks-as it is in England.
Everywhere in Italy and France the
trees are pitifully mutilated. Where
they are allowed TO grow to their nat
ural heieht-as they sometimes are on
the Italian COAST observed they lean
from the southwest, as they do all
over America. OF course, where silk
worm culture is carried on, as between
Milan and Como, it is necessary that
the mulberry trees be trained low for
convenience in picking the l~arvaes.
Where grapes are grown it is hard to
tell why living saplings are universal
ly planted and trimmed down as sup
port for the vines, unless it is that
ground could not be spared for cop
pices or that the fruit ripens best in
partial shade. In France and Ger
many the vines are simply tied to up
right sticks. Descriptions of the vine
in Italy by tourists are always vague
and sentimental, and | had wondered
how in the world grapes could ripen
in the shade of large trees. A glance
explained all; the trees turned out to
be no taller than hop poles, and so
trimmed to a few horizontal branches
trained lengthwise of the row that the
shading was reduced to a minimum.
The vines hung in loops or ~festoons
from sapling to sapling, as if taking
hold of hands. On the foothills south
of the Campagna travellers may see
grape vines grown around a bunch of
dead poles tied together wigwam fash
ion at the top. The sapling trees are
rarely more than Is feet high, gener-
ally not so much. In n region only,
and that near Naples, did | see the
vines trained on tolerably large trees,
swinging from bole to bole, like spider
webs. That the hotter sun does not
necessitate this l discovered by the
vineyards on the fiery southern slope
of Vesuvius, which are trained low
and have scarcely any shade.