Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/32

26 of the most beautiful garden-flowers came from this land. They were first carried to Europe by visitors to Mexico, and thence, after being domesticated in the old gardens of Spain and France, they have found their way back to their native continent as emigrants from the Old World. All the dahlias can trace lineage to some gay beauties that once grew on these.mountain-top meadows of Mexico. It was years before they could be civilized enough to dress in double sets of petals, and the gardeners of this day have only to let them alone for a while, and they go back to their wild Mexican singleness.

It is in the low lands along the sea that we find the luxuriance and variety of tropical vegetation. "Even the sand-dunes," says a recent writer, "blaze in color, lupines in high waving masses of white, yellow and blue, great mats of glittering ice-plants with myriads of rose-colored umbels, lying flat on the white sand, while all the air is sweet with fragrance."

Here were multitudes of plants which are at home only in Mexico. Among them was the cacao, from which the natives prepared their delicious chocolate, and whose seeds passed from hand to hand instead of coin. The vanilla, which grew only on the seashore, was used then as now for flavoring. The cochineal was also raised on the coast; it was the insect which fed on the leaves of a cactus-plant. From the dried body of the female was procured a brilliant red color much used by the Aztecs in dyeing their cotton cloth.

Next to the bamboo, there is probably no plant which can be used in so many ways as the Mexican agave, or maguey. Of its bruised leaves were made broad sheets of paper, on which the most of Mexican history was