Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Indian Pilot Led Us Across His Garden, Which Rather Resembled A
Copse Than A Piece Of Cultivated Ground.
He showed us, as a proof
of the fertility of this climate, a silk-cotton tree (Bombax
heptaphyllum), the trunk of which, in its fourth year, had reached
nearly two feet and a half in diameter.
We have observed, on the
banks of the Orinoco and the river Magdalena, that the bombax, the
carolinea, the ochroma, and other trees of the family of the
malvaceae, are of extremely rapid growth. I nevertheless think that
there was some exaggeration in the report of the Indian respecting
the age of his bombax; for under the temperate zone, in the hot and
damp lands of North America, between the Mississippi and the
Alleghany mountains, the trees do not exceed a foot in diameter, in
ten years. Vegetation in those parts is in general but a fifth more
speedy than in Europe, even taking as an example the Platanus
occidentalis, the tulip tree, and the Cupressus disticha, which
reach from nine to fifteen feet in diameter. On the strand of
Cumana, in the garden of the Guayqueria pilot, we saw for the first
time a guama* loaded with flowers, and remarkable for the extreme
length and silvery splendour of its numerous stamina. (* Inga
spuria, which we must not confound with the common inga, Inga vera,
Willd. (Mimosa Inga, Linn.). The white stamina, which, to the
number of sixty or seventy, are attached to a greenish corolla,
have a silky lustre, and are terminated by a yellow anther.
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