Bermuda’s attractions include botanical garden

Charles Darwin said that every traveler should be a botanist since plants are the chief adornment of the landscape. Another way of putting it might be to say that the average tourist misses half the fun of visiting a foreign land if he ignores the plant life.

With that bit of green moralism, let me point out to anyone bound for Bermuda that in addition to gorgeous beaches and deluxe shopping, the tiny island colony also boasts a botanical garden that is strictly world class. My wife and I visited the Bermuda Botanical Gardens last August, and we came away with an instant education in tropical botany as well as a new appreciation for the challenges of tropical gardening.

The weather was typical of the season — high 80s and a humidity level that I swear was considerably over 100 percent. We arrived just in time to catch the morning tour guided by a volunteer and amateur botanist who seemed quite knowledgeable and was at least as English as Queen Elizabeth. (Bermuda is the only colony of the former British Empire that never asked for independence from the sovereign.)

Mad dogs and Englishmen notwithstanding, the tour proceeded amiably from shade tree to shade tree so as to minimize the likelihood of heat prostration. First stop was a magnificent specimen of the royal poinciana tree (Delonix regia) which, although introduced from Madagascar, has made a home for itself not only in the thin soils of the island but also in the hearts of the locals. They revere the tree for its exquisite spreading habit, fernlike foliage and lavish display of scarlet, orchid-like blooms beginning in April, after what Bermudians think was a long and chilly winter. As the swallows are to Capistrano, so the poinciana trees are to Bermuda.

When Admiral Sir George Somers was shipwrecked on Bermuda, interrupting his voyage to the Jamestown colony in 1607, he found an uninhabited island covered with a thick cedar forest. Juniperus bermudiana is the Latin name of the Bermuda cedar, arguably the noblest of the New World cedars. It’s wood is harder, denser and generally more useful for everything from boats to churches than any of its mainland relatives.

For some 300 years the colonists enjoyed the rich natural resource of their cedar forests until the equivalent of our chestnut blight or Dutch elm disease struck in the form of a scale insect that killed all but a few stands of Bermuda cedar. The devastation left the island in a sad state and numerous replacement species were soon introduced. Casuarina, an Australian pine-like tree adapted quickly to local conditions, but its wood is nearly useless. Happily, natural resistance seems to be occurring among the remaining cedars and reforestation is considered a real possibility. Second stop on the tour was a visit to the garden’s prized specimen of Juniperus bermudiana.

After a brief lesson in some of the other native plants and an introduction to the mysteries of growing the ubiquitous dwarf bananas favored on this windy island, we left the tour to explore the amazing range of gardens and conservatories on our own.

The Ficus (Latin for fig) collection gives every visitor an awesome appreciation for this important tropical genus. Enormous trees with exotically sculpted trunks and weird aerial roots descending from the canopy represent the largest species of this group which also includes rubber trees and the much smaller edible fig trees.

A garden for the blind was laid out following a formal pattern with central fountain. All plants are either highly tactile or fragrant or both and have been planted in beds raised a generous 3 feet off the ground.

Palms abound in Bermuda and at the Bermuda Botanical Gardens one finds them arranged and labelled so as to make sense of the many types one encounters. More numerous and diverse still are the cacti and succulents grown in pots and housed in a large open conservatory. I have never seen a collection to compare with this one, at least for variety if not imaginative display.

Ferns and other tropical exotics are kept in several well laid out greenhouses surrounded by a rock garden, tropical style. Animal lovers can stroll through the aviary. The attractions just go on and on until one is faint with heat and-or hunger. In the latter instance, we found the lunch room to be better than most of the restaurants we had lunched at, at least if one is ready for some normal American-style food. The gift store was most satisfactory as well, especially since it featured a large display of Snow and Nealley garden tools made right here in Bangor.

Given the choice, I would make my next visit to Bermuda in April and I’d head for the Botanical Gardens straightway, as the British say.

Michael Zuck of Bangor is a horticulturist and the NEWS garden columnist. Send inquiries to him at 2106 Essex St., Bangor, Maine 04401.