Page:A Physical and Topographical Sketch of the Mississippi Territory, Lower Louisiana, and a Part of West Florida.djvu/25

 sideroxylon, sambucus, prunus alba, p. rubra, &c. This beautiful assemblage of trees is dressed out with festoons of different kinds of vitis, and wreaths of diferentdifferent [sic] species of climbing plants, such as the bignonia radicans, smilax, bryonia, several species of passiflora, bastard foxglove, yellow jasmine, &c.

The happy climate which prevails throughout this delicious valley, added to the prolifick quality of its soil, renders it perhaps one of the most desirable spots in North America. There are few tropical plants that could not find an asylum in this hospitable situation; and daily experience proves, that plants which have been brought here from more northern countries thrive with luxuriance. As it may not be uninteresting I will enumerate a few such as are commonly cultivated in their gardens, viz. anguria, pepo, capsicum, mala aurea, asparagus, rapum, daucus, mentha, melo, cucumis, brassica coleflora, cynara, pastinaca, brassica capitata, lactuca, spinachia, beta, nasturtium, cepa, apium dulce, raphanus, alium, porrum, pisum, cydonia, malus, pyrus, aurantium, ficus nigra, fragaria, &c.

After we leave this valley, continuing east, the soil grows poorer, and the country somewhat more elevated, though not so much so as to give it a hilly appearance, until we meet with the open pine lands; where it assumes a character which it afterwards preserves for a width of near two hundred miles. Gently swelling sand plains, thinly covered with the pinus tæda, p. lutea, occasionally interrupted with copses of