Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/89

Rh plants were in bloom, there was still an attractive orchid-show.

But the strangest, most conspicuous bloom in that choice corner was a great butterfly flower of a pitcher-plant (a nepenthes), whose pale-green petals were veined with velvety maroon, and half concealed the pelican pouch of a pitcher filled with water. It was an evil-looking, ill-smelling, sticky thing, and its unusual size and striking colors made it haunt one longest of all vegetable marvels. There were other more attractive butterflies fluttering on pliant stems, strange little woolly white orchids, like edelweiss transplanted, and scores of delicate Java and Borneo orchids, not so well known as the Venezuelan and Central American orchids commonly grown in American hothouses, and so impossible to acclimate in Java.

Lady Raffles died while Sir Stamford was governor of Java, and was buried in the section of the palace park that was afterward (in 1817) set apart as a botanical garden, and the care of the little Greek temple over her grave near the kanari avenue was provided for in a special clause in the treaty of cession. The bust of Theismann, who founded the garden and added so much to botanical knowledge by his studies in Java and Borneo, stands in an oval pleasance called the rose-garden; and there one may take heart and boast of the temperate zone, since that rare exotic, the rose, is but a spindling bush, and its blossoming less than scanty at Buitenzorg, when one remembers California's, and more especially Tacoma's, perennial prodigalities in showers of roses. Visiting botanists and students are always at work in these