Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/271

 a whole orchard that had been tended for years with assiduous care calmly dying down from the top and sinking back into the earth from whence it sprang.

More than anything else the grapefruit must have the right subsoil under it. If you plant your trees where they may be well drained and where the soil beneath their tap-roots is a good clay, overlaid of course with the all-pervading Florida sand, they will love you for it. Care and fertilizer will do the rest, though even then it must be the right kind of care and of fertilizer. If you plant your trees where there is a "hard-pan bottom" neither love, money nor religion will bring them to good bearing. Why "hard-pan" which seems to be a dense stratum of black sulphuret of iron should be under the surface of one man's ten-acre lot, while under that of his next-door neighbor lies the beloved red clay, it is difficult to explain. Florida reminds me always of Cape Cod. It seems to be built out of the chips and dust of the making of the near-by continent, dumped irrelevantly. There is no telling why one acre is a desert that one would plough as uselessly as Ulysses ploughed the seashore and the next acre is fat with fertility, but it is so.

Hence people plant grapefruit groves not where they will, but where they may, and you discover them in the most delightful out-of-the