Then, abandoning for a few hours
her orderly and kindly ways, Nature runs amok, raving and shrieking. Her
transient irresponsibleness and mischievousness are then cited as
everyday, persistent vices. Not so. Nature is rational even in her most
passionate moments. Vegetation, rank and gross as in an unweeded garden,
requires vigorous lopping and pruning. These twenty-year-interval storms
comb out superfluous leaves and branches, cut out dead wood, send to the
ground decayed and weakly shoots, and scrub and cleanse trunks and
branches of parasitic growths. All is done boldly, yet with such skill
that in a few weeks losses are hidden under masses of clean, insectless,
healthy, bright foliage. The soil has received a luxurious top-dressing.
Trees and plants respond to the stimulus with magical vigour, for lazy,
slumbering forces have been roused into efforts so splendid that the
realism of tropical vegetation is to be appreciated only after Nature has
swept and sweetened her garden.
A more vivid and more idealised medium than the poor one which with
diffidence I employ were essential if entertainment alone were sought in
these pages; but even faint and imperfect etching of one Australian
scene, little known even to Australians, may in some degree tend to
enlightenment.
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