Page:Extracts from the letters and journals of George Fletcher Moore.djvu/71

 rains which flooded the ground; and in spring its vegetation was rapid and healthy. All sorts of garden and field vegetables thrive well, when put down in the proper season; but nothing worthy of being called fruit has as yet been discovered, if we except the zamia, which produces a nut, which the natives eat after considerable preparation by steeping in water. Tobacco, hemp, flax, eringo, celery, parsley, are indigenous. To the distant eye, the country has the appearance of being well wooded, but I should not say it was thickly timbered. In some places there are open plains that resemble well ordered parks, no where do you find impenetrable jungle, save in the mere swamps and the lagoons. The seemingly conflicting accounts of two, ten, one hundred, or a thousand trees to an acre, may be all true of different places, if you reckon every shrub as a tree. Take, for example, the ground where I have built: to avoid injuring the appearance of the place, I have cut down but one large tree, and not above a dozen shrubs and small trees, preferring to fell the timber necessary for building, at the distance of a quarter of a mile.

Just behind my house (on the high level land), is a plain of perhaps two hundred acres, upon which large trees are not numerous, or more than sufficient for ornament. There is one spot looking like a cleared field, of eight or nine acres, not encumbered with a single tree or shrub. In other